This is the first part of a Netsuite Connector review series I have conducted. In this post, I review Boomi’s capabilities for building custom Netsuite integrations, by demonstrating in detail how Boomi could be used by administrators and developers alike to build professional Netsuite integrations in a short amount of time, without writing one line of code.
I’ll keep the blog post brief, the video below will review every aspect of the integration in substantial detail.
Review Criteria
I have formulated the review to assess Boomi in terms of it’s ability to build Netsuite integrations in a no-code fashion. I will be demonstrating its capabilities in terms of the following aspects:
- Ease of use
- Time to develop
- Modularity and Reusability
- Connectors readily available
- Ability to decrypt PGP armored files
- Ability to transform and map data
- Date Formatting
- Lookup tables
- Caching Options
- Decision Routing
- Error handling
- Logging
Business Case
The process (integration flow) I have built is based on the following business case:
“A deposit taking bank places encrypted transaction files once daily in an S3 bucket, and would like to integrate each csv file into Netsuite. The lines in the text file, which correspond to transactions, have to be posted as Journal Entries (one double entry record per line), with the Accounts being selected based on a field (transaction type) in the CSV file.”
Implementation Details
The process flow goes something like this:
- Try/Catch block
- Request to S3 to list bucket contents
- Filter file list based on last modified date
- Accept/Reject Paths
- Request to Netsuite to fetch accounts
- Save accounts to memory
- Request to S3 to read accepted file keys’ contents
- Decision tree based on whether file content is encrypted
- If encrypted, decrypt using PGP library
- Parse file text into CSV profile
- Retrieve accounts from cache, format dates, lookup account internal ids
- Map all fields necessary for journal creation in Netsuite to XML profile
- Request to Netsuite to create journals
Boomi-specific features used and reviewed (in video)
- Netsuite connector was used to fetch Accounts, and post Journals
- Amazon S3 REST Connector was used to list bucket contents, and read file contents
- Business Rules Shape was used to accept certain files, and reject others
- Map Functions were used to format dates
- Cross-Reference Tables were used to act as a mapping containing accounting related business logic
- Branch Shapes were used to execute various paths to completion sequentially, first path A, then path B.
- Add to Cache was used to store documents temporarily in memory, enabling us to make one request for a long list of accounts, and access account related fields like internal ids from memory, avoiding the need for multiple external lookups to Netsuite.
- Flat File Profiles was used to mimic our CSV file structure, and enable us to parse the file text into a profile that could be used for further processing
- Data Processes were used to decrypt PGP encrypted text, and split CSV file into separate lines
- XML Profiles were used to transform flat file profiles into canonical and then Journal CREATE XML profiles.
Summary
Being a new user to the Boomi platform myself, I can say that the tool has exceeded my expectations in many ways. Especially compared to some other popular options on the market like Celigo for example.
The modular nature of the integration platform allows you to build reusable components, each fulfilling a particular integration task, which could be put together on the drag and drop canvas, to create complex multi-path processes, in most cases without writing a single line of code. Having worked with many other tools, I was always in a situation where I needed something that was not there, whether it was an external library, a formatting function, an out of the box connector to some third-party application or the ability to create multiple process paths to treat data differently based on some conditions. Everything I needed was there out of the box with Boomi.
Here’s a video review where I analyse the process I built for the above use case in detail.
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