inQuiry - inRiver Type Provider

inQuiry is an F# type provider for inRiver PIM. The purpose is to provide a strongly typed alternative to the Remoting API that requires less coding, ease of use and security. This is done by generating types in compile time that will supply most of the boilerplate coding needed for the Remoting API.

Create a new product with Remoting API (example code from inRiver Wiki)

// Get product entity type
EntityType productEntityType = RemoteManager.ModelService.GetEntityType("Product");
// Create entity object
Entity product = Entity.CreateEntity(productEntityType);
// Set product number, it is a mandatory field
Field productNumber = product.Fields.Find(f => f.FieldType.Id == "ProductNumber");
productNumber.Data = "ANewProductNumber";
// Add the new product to PIM
Entity createdProduct = RemoteManager.DataService.AddEntity(product);

The same thing with inQuiry.

// Create a new product and save it
pim.Product(number = "ANewProductNumber") |> pim.Product.save

The strong type pim.Product is generated from the entity information in the inRiver Model API. Why do we prefer using inQuiry?

• Less code means fewer mistakes
• Easier to read code
• No magic strings or null references
• Error handling when the model changes is built in
• When the model changes you get compile time errors in stead of runtime errors

Please take a look at more examples in the Wiki to understand how to use inQuiry.

Installation & Getting Started

Open Package-Manager in Visual Studio and install the inQuiry package in your F# project.

Install-Package inQuiry

Or configure Paket to install inQuiry. Put the following in your paket.dependencies file and run .paket\paket.exe install.

nuget inQuiry

More information on how to get started with inQuiry can be found in the wiki.

Version of inRiver that are supported

inQuiry supports the following versions of inRiver Remoting API. These versions are verified each time a new minor version is tagged. inRiver version support will not be verified for each an every commit.

inRiver Version
6.3.0 SP2

Can I use inQuiry from C#?

You can use inQuiry from an F# project or an FSX script file. Use an F# project if you want to create a plugin to inRiver using inQuiry, or use an FSX script file if you just want to run some code calling the inRiver API.

C# does not support type providers and such inQuiry does not support C#. If you are a C# developer you should not be intimidated by F# as the code you'll write to integrate with inRiver will be mostly imperative anyway so C#/F# solutions would be quite similiar to each other.

If you want to use inQuiry together with C# you can use F#/inQuiry to provide a data layer and expose the functionality to C# through a facade. This is quite simple and you should look in the examples section for it. However you can not return a strongly generated type from inQuiry to your C# code. The interface between C# and F# must always be entities from inRiver Remoting API.

Contributing

Not able to handle contributions to this project at this time. This is a 1.0 feature.