Resource Converters

Overview

LedgerSync provides ledger-specific resources and operations for you to easily interface with a ledger. Complexity arises for a few reasons, such as the following:

• Ledgers have different resources. Some ledgers may not even implement the same resources as another ledger.
• Resources for a given ledger have different attributes from their counterparts in other ledgers.
• Operations may not be supported in all ledgers (e.g. deletion is not available for some resources in QuickBooks Online)
• etc.

Because of this complexity, LedgerSync tries to remain “unopinionated” about ledgers. The goal is to have resources, attributes, and operations that match as closely to the API as possible. The issue here is that it requires a developer to have ledger-specific knowledge for every interaction with LedgerSync or to define new resource, operation, and validation layers entirely.

To solve this problem, some engineers at Modern Treasury have created what we call a ResourceConverter. This object takes in a source and destination. It also defines the mapping from source to destination. This makes it easy to take any object and map it to a ledger-specific resource. Having a converter per resource per ledger enables you to create an interface with LedgerSync. After this layer is created, future developers are not required to have ledger-specific knowledge to make updates.

Let’s see how this works.

Scenario

Let’s assume that we have a Customer model object that we use internally that looks like the following:

class Customer
  attr_accessor :name
  attr_accessor :email
  attr_accessor :id
end

We want to sync the data on this object (specifically name, email, and id) to QuickBooks Online and NetSuite. We will also assume that we have already handled authentication and have a valid client for each(quickbooks_online_client and netsuite_client, respectively). Both ledgers implement their own Customer object, but the attributes for these objects vary. For example, here are the relevant snippets of these resources:

module LedgerSync
  module Ledgers
    module QuickBooksOnline
      class Customer < QuickBooksOnline::Resource
        attribute :DisplayName, type: LedgerSync::Type::String

        references_one :PrimaryEmailAddr, to: PrimaryEmailAddr
      end
    end
  end
end

module LedgerSync
  module Ledgers
    module QuickBooksOnline
      class PrimaryEmailAddr < QuickBooksOnline::Resource
        attribute :Address, type: LedgerSync::Type::String
      end
    end
  end
end

module LedgerSync
  module Ledgers
    module NetSuite
      class Customer < NetSuite::Resource
        attribute :email, type: LedgerSync::Type::String
        attribute :companyName, type: LedgerSync::Type::String
        attribute :firstName, type: LedgerSync::Type::String
        attribute :lastName, type: LedgerSync::Type::String
      end
    end
  end
end

• Resource Converters
• Custom Resources
• Custom Serializers