I'm looking for a better method of importing data into Baan for another application. Currently we have a program that collects labor hours from the shop floor and then needs to export data into Baan. Because of timing issues (someone needs to check the data before it goes to Baan) we can't have an exchange script run automatically each day. I would also like to avoid exchange scripts because when using them to import data to the HRA tables I have discovered that if you run the import twice with the same data it will not appear in the HRA tables but will in fact appear in financial integrations. This makes for inconstancies between reports and crabby accountants.

In an ideal world I would have a program that could write directly to the Baan tables and skip a step for the users. To the best of my knowledge there is no way to do this with Baan IVc4 and SQL Server 7.0. Short of that I would like to have some method that doesn’t require the user to have two steps with the potential to skip one. The data collection program in written in house (in VB 6.0) and potentially could have access to the database (it currently looks up production orders, etc).

a function server looks like the way to go, you can create a dll and call that from vb or pass the stpapi commands directly to ottstpapihand.

there are a lot of good threads with sample code about using stpapi on the board.