Call us: +1 (716) 989 6531 or email at:

Forecasting Software for sales, demand and call volumes

RSS RSS

Navigation





Search the wiki
»

PoweredBy

Developer guide for Lokad osCommerce Sales Forecasting

RSS
Products » osCommerce Sales Forecasting » Here

This application is no longer maintained by Lokad.
we suggest to use to Lokad Safety Stock Calculator instead.

Developer guide for Lokad osCommerce


This document provides technical information about Lokad osCommerce Sales Forecasting. The purpose of this document is to help a developer to understand (and possibly to extend) our PHP application. This document is not intended to be used by regular users, instead we suggest to refer to Getting Started and to the User Guide.

Getting the source code

The PHP contribution has been developed and tested with PHP 4. You can retrieve the latest version of the source code from the Subversion repository of the 'lokad' project on Sourceforge.net. You will need a Subversion client to retrieve the code. You do not already have such a client, we suggest TortoiseSVN.

Subversion URL: https://lokad.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lokad/oscommerce

Lokad osCommerce settings

Lokad osCommerce settings are handled using osCommerce standard configuration system. A configuration group called Lokad is added. Nine parameters are created in this group. Their configuration keys start with LOKAD_. For more info about these parameters, please refer to the setup guide.

Install / Uninstall scripts

Lokad Sales Forecasting for osCommerce uses the osCommerce database to stores its preferences. It also creates two tables, lokad_update and lokad_data which are necessary to handle data upload and forecasts downloads.

When the plugin is used for the first time, it initializes the database by calling the script oscommerce/catalog/admin/includes/classes/lokad/install.php. The install can also be forced by accessing URL /admin/lokad.php?step=install.

oscommerce/catalog/admin/includes/classes/lokad/uninstall.php removes all traces of Lokad from the osCommerce database. It is called by accessing URL /admin/lokad.php?step=uninstall.

Sales data retrieval from the osCommerce

Uploading sales data actually requires two steps: retrieve sales data from the osCommerce database, and send them to Lokad.com. These two tasks can be fully separated.

We call the module that retrieves sales data a provider. Porting Lokad for a given application basically means writing a suitable provider. Lokad Sales Forecasting for osCommerce directly reads sales data in the MySQL database.

Interacting with the Lokad Web Services

The NuSOAP library is used to interact with Lokad web services. If you are interested in accessing Lokad web services within a PHP application, you can read our tutorial.

This library is included in the plugin distribution under /catalog/admin/includes/classes/lokad/lib/.

Internationalization support

Currently, Lokad Sales Forecasting for osCommerce is only localized in English. All text strings used by the plugin are defined in /catalog/admin/includes/languages/english/lokad.php. Localizations for other languages can be written by duplicating this file to /catalog/admin/includes/languages/your_language/lokad.php and translating the strings.