Export basic sales data from JD Edwards

Question

JD Edwards is sales and accounting software sold and supported by Oracle. We need to get daily or weekly exports from an affiliate using JD Edwards, which I can then import into our system. That means I don't want any answers that result in some sort of proprietary format. Surely there is an "Export" button, or a way to save reports as Excell/CSV/TXT/XML/...?

Ideally, it should be something that the users at that company can run manually or schedule to run automatically. There's no real tech support over there, and I'm not keen to drive there and try to learn their system from scratch.

Edit: 2009-01-23 From what I read on the web, JD Edwards is backed onto an Oracle database, but the ERD is fairly difficult to understand without a data dictionary. Can anyone suggest either SQL to pull out basic sales data, or else point me at a webpage describing the data model?

Edit: 2009-04-21 Just a follow-up: they're running JDE via terminals to an AS/400. So it's strictly cursors and keyboard commands. None of the users seem to have access to real reporting; some of the screen show summaries, which the users paste into emails. So we haven't been able to follow dviggiani's advice of automated JDE Report exports.

Answer 1

Which version of JDEdwards is being used, on which platform? The easiest way to extract the data is to set the output of a JDEdwards report to be CSV. Create a Columnar report to be run daily or weekly, with the output set to CSV. Depending on the version of JDEdwards that is being used, you can also set the output of a report to be XML.

Regards,

Daniel

Answer 2

Rick,

I've been away from JDE world for about 2 years and I had little experience with the AS/400 version (World).

The AS/400 version (used to be called WorldSoftware) has far less functionality to the final users.

Also, even if you know the data model to extract data from a 3rd-party tool, you still will have to work with the data dictionary quirkness. For instance: dates are actually integers that represent a julian date, doubles are actually integers and you have to divide them by 10^(number of decimal places on the data dictionary of that specific item) and so on.

If it was a OneWorld/EnterpriseOne (the windows/web version) you would have plenty of options and I would be more able to help. For instance, the users could export any grid on their screens straight to Excel.

The data you want, Sales, is on the 42 family. So, F4201 would be the table for Sales Orders, F4211 would be Order Items. Those are the basic tables, but there are more that can matter to your needs or not, it depends.

My best advice: try asking for some help on www.jdelist.com on the World forums. You'll have people that are apt to help you. I admit that I don't know enough of World and AS/400 to do it.

If you need anything else, let me know.

Cheers.