Polling Integration
Overview of polling-based integration patterns between FileMaker and QuickBooks Online.
This section explores how to implement polling-based integration patterns between FileMaker and QuickBooks Online, using employee data as our primary example.
Understanding Change Data Capture
Many systems provide Change Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms that track data modifications. QBO offers such a capability, but with an important limitation: it only captures changes within the last 30 days.
While CDC is valuable (particularly for detecting deleted records), it's usually not sufficient on its own. You still need a mechanism to synchronize older data or perform full data refreshes. This is why we'll implement time-based polling mechanisms in this workshop.
Workshop Exercises
In this section, we'll work through several exercises:
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Pulling Employees from QBO: Implementing a polling mechanism to retrieve employee data from QBO based on modification timestamps.
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Pushing Employees to QBO: Sending changed employee records from FileMaker to QBO.
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Complete Sync Engine: Combining both approaches into a comprehensive synchronization system.
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Sync Considerations: A recap of advanced synchronization challenges and solutions.
Most of the detailed exercise instructions will be available in the SimpleLedger FileMaker file itself, with these pages providing context and key concepts.