Creating a Custom XML Node in an Existing eConnect Schema

This is the fifth in a series of articles covering eConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

• Part 1 explained that the business logic for eConnect exists in stored procedures within the Dynamics GP company database.
• Part 2 created an eConnect integration utilizing the .NET APIs within Visual Studio.
• Part 3 examined using eConnect directly from a SQL stored procedure.
• Part 4 demonstrated extending the default eConnect business logic with "Pre" and "Post" Stored Procedures.

In this article we examine creating our own custom XML nodes for eConnect. This ability greatly enhances the potential to extend the current business logic within eConnect by allowing the creation of completely new procedures within an eConnect document type.

The creation of a new XML node consists of three steps:

1. The creation of new stored procedure code containing the business logic that we wish to add to eConnect.
2. Inserting the new stored procedure logic into the existing stored procedure
3. Adding a new XML node to an eConnect schema that will utilize the new stored procedure.

For this week's example we will add an XML node to the RMCustomerMasterType schema which will store an IP address in a custom SQL table along with the corresponding customer ID. We utilized that schema in part 2 of this series of articles to capture the IP address from our e-commerce site.

Step 1 - Create the Stored Procedure used by the new XML node.

When creating ...