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MYOB ODBC – Brutal Deluxe

Wednesday 09 July 2008, 09:14 WST —

No, this is not about a metal band from London, England.  It’s a reference to Speedball 2, I just thought to would be more interesting to say then “Part 2″.  Anyway, I now have WindowsXP running quite nicely under VirtualBox.

By the way, the wallpapers are from VladStudio.com, I liked them so much I got a lifetime subscription.  Anyway, the first step is to get MYOB up and running, this is pretty easy, just install it as you would any normal application. Now I’m doing a full install of MYOB Premier 11 from the 2008 compliance CD, which automatically installs the ODBC driver, you may have to install the driver seperately if your situation differs.

Ok, now with MYOB installed, it’s time to setup the ODBC driver, now when I subscribed to the developer program I got a CD with all the MYOB software, I also got a developer key file, this file is what enables write access to my MYOB file.  Also, as long as you’re a registered MYOB developer, your customers can call up and get ODBC enabled for their company files, I really don’t know much about that as everything I’m doing is for my company already.

The key has to be saved somewhere the host machine can access it, as the key file is used all the time.  Ok, so, on WindowsXP you would:

• Open Control Panel.
• If you’re in Classic view, you would then go to “Administrative Tools”, otherwise “Performance and Maintenance”, then “Administrative Tools”.
• Open Data Sources (ODBC).
• I prefer adding a user data source, but system datasource follows the same procedure.
• “Add”, then select “MYOB_ODBC”.
• Give your datasource a name, this is what’s going to be used to reference it from Rails.
• I don’t bother with a description, I’m lazy.
• Select your company file, we have our MYOB company file on a Solaris server running ZFS.
• It will now give your more options, such as a username and password, and developer access fields.
• Enter the username and password (Having a dedicated user for the Rails app is a good idea).
• Enter the path to the MYOB application .exe, default is “C:\Premier11\Myobp.exe”.
• File Access is Multi-user Access, with TCP/IP.
• Finally browse to your developer key file.

Phew, it’s interesting to note that the ODBC driver asks for the MYOB executable, that’s because the ODBC driver is simply a bridge to the MYOB program, it runs MYOB in a special, no interface, mode.  This is one of the reasons it’s good to have a dedicated Rails MYOB user account, I found that sometimes I was getting the username and password prompt coming up on my desktop.

It’s also interesting to point out, that the ODBC driver does a big job of abstracting SQL calls to the MYOB program and the results.  However, when we start getting down to getting some Rails code operating on it, we’re going to find out how much of a pain it is that the ODBC driver is simply an abstraction.

VirtualBox on Solaris

Tuesday 08 July 2008, 12:33 WST —

As part of the new MYOB intergration system I’m working on, I thought it would be a good idea to have the Solaris server also run a copy of Windows.  Why? Well for MYOB and the ODBC stuff of course.  (You can find more info in a previous post).  Anyway, there seems to be a pretty good post “Exploring Sun’s xVM VirtualBox” detailing on how to install it, and because I’m lazy and don’t actually want to keep walking over to the Solaris box all the time, I also installed VNC on the server, unfortunately there isn’t really an up to date howto on getting VNC up and running on Solaris 200805.

However, I found this post, which gave me enough info to get it up and running:

• Make sure xvnc package is installed (SUNWxvnc)
• Edit /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf (details in the link)
• Edit /etc/services
• Start the vnc service.

Just a note, VNC will not work properly if you’re using Compiz, be sure to disable it.

If, like me, you’re installing from CDs, then it’s probably easier to copy an image of the CD rather than try and use the host cd drive directly.  VirtualBox doesn’t seem to be able to find them.  Also, if like me you want to run WindowsXP as a guest OS, and use host based networking, then check this page for the post by Hasham.

The important part is to have your virtual MAC address match the MAC address in VirtualBox.