A New Online Tool To Get Started With Vision API

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Over the years I found that people always had a hard time getting started with Deltek Vision’s API. I do admit, it probably has a lot to do with the message structures the API is expecting.

To jump-start your development I just created an online Test Bench that allows you to connect to your service, run some reads and writes and returns you both a VB.net code sample and a SOAP UI request message that can be copied either into Visual Studio or SOAP UI to give you instant results.

How Does It Work?

It’s pretty straight forward: go to https://visionapitestbench.steepvalley.net and follow the steps outlined below…

1. Check for the service to be active

Click on “Check Service” and enter the URL to your Vision Web Service which is usually either http://myserver.com/vision/visionws.asmx when you run Vision on premise or https://{yourclientname}.deltekfirst.com/{yourclientname}/visionws.asmx.

If you run in HTTPS, check the checkbox below and provide the credentials to connect to your https site if necessary.

Then click Test Service.

If the site can find the Vision web services you will see the screenshot below with a “Successful” info and a code sample (in VB.net) on how to connect to your Vision API service.

2. Check if you can connect to your database

Once you successfully located the service, the site will allow you to continue to Check Connection. Here the site will display a dropdown with all databases defined in your weblink of your vision site and allows you to pick one.

Provide a user name and password that has access rights to the selected database and click on Check Connection

The site only supports users created directly in Vision that are NOT Windows users

The results page now shows you both a vb.net code snippet that you can copy and paste directly into Visual Studio and a fully formed XML request that can be used right inside SOAP UI

3. Try to read data from an info centre

If you are able to successfully connect to your Vision database you can now run a simple GetRecordsByKey or GetRecordsByQuery.

The Read From InfoCenter page allows you to pick an info centre, a record detail and either a key (like WBS1, Employee, ClientID, etc…) or an SQL subselect to extract data from your database.

The result page not only shows you the returned data but also (again) a vb.net code snippet and a fully formed SOAP UI request

Have Fun!

This should give you now all the tools to get you up and running with the Vision API in no time.

At this point (mid March 2017) there’s only the reading functions implemented in the Test Bench Tool. In the following weeks I will extend the Test Tool Bench with similar functionality to write to the database and execute stored procedures.

If you are interested in some specific API methods, let me know and I can see if I can implement them into the test bench.

Enjoy
Mike Dobler

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