Wrapper gem for Fortnox AB's version 3 REST(ish) API. If you need to integrate an existing or new Ruby or Rails app against Fortnox this gem will save you a lot of time, you are welcome. Feel free to repay the community with some nice PRs of your own :simple_smile:
The rough status of this project is as follows (as of November 2016):
- In active development (just check out the commit log)
- Two developers. At least twice as good as one.
- Basic structure complete. Things like getting customers and invoices, updating and saving etc.
- Some advanced features implemented, for instance support for multiple Access Tokens and filtering entities.
- Advanced features around the corner. Things like sorting entities, pagination of results etc.
- A few models implemented. Right now we have nearly full support for
Customer,InvoiceandOrder. Adding more models in general is quick and easy, see the developer guide further down. - Massive refactorings no longer occurs weakly :) We are running this gem in production for live test.
The goal is to have a production ready version that covers at least the Invoice, Order, Customer and Project models by January.
The gem is structured with distinct models for the tasks of data, JSON mapping and saving state. These are called: model, type, mapper and repository.
If you come from a Rails background and have not been exposed to other ways of structuring the solution to the CRUD problem this might seem strange to you since ActiveRecord merges these roles into the ActiveRecord::Base class.
To keep it simple: The active record pattern (as implemented by Rails) is easier to work with if you only have one data source, the database, in your application. The data mapper pattern is easier to work with if you have several data sources, such as different databases, external APIs and flat files on disk etc, in your application. It's also easier to compose the data mapper components into active record like classes than to separate active records parts to get a data mapper style structure.
If you are interested in a more detailed description of the difference between the two architectures you can read this post that explains it well using simple examples: What’s the difference between Active Record and Data Mapper?
The model role classes serve as dumb data objects. They do have some logic to coheres values etc, but they do not contain validation logic nor any business logic at all.
Several of the models share attributes. One example is account, as in a Bookkeeping account number. These attributes have the same definition, cohesion and validation logic so it makes sense to extract them from the models and put them in separate classes. For more information, see Types below.
The model instances are immutable. That means:
customer.name # => "Old Name"
customer.name = 'New Name' # => "New Name"
customer.name == "New Name" # => falseNormally you would expect an assignment to mutate the instance and update the name field. Immutability explicitly means that you can't mutate state this way, any operation that attempts to update state needs to return a new instance with the updated state while leaving the old instance alone.
So you might think you should do this instead:
customer = customer.name = 'New Name' # => "New Name"But if you are familiar with chaining assignments in Ruby you will see that this does not work. The result of any assignment, LHS = RHS, operation in Ruby is RHS. Even if you implement your own = method and explicitly return something else. This is a feature of the language and not something we can get around. So instead you have to do:
customer.name # => "Old Name"
updated_customer = customer.update( name: 'New Name' ) # => <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x007fdf22949298 ... >
updated_customer.name == "New Name" # => trueAnd note that:
customer.name # => "Old Name"
customer.update( name: 'New Name' ) # => <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x007fdf21100b00 ... >
customer.name == "New Name" # => falseThis is how all the models work, they are all immutable.
Models can throw Fortnox::API::AttributeError if an attribute is invalid in some way (for instance if you try to assign a too long string to a limited string attribute) and Fortnox::API::MissingAttributeError if a required attribute is missing.
The types automatically enforce the constraints on values, lengths and, in some cases, content of the model attributes. Types forces your models to be correct before sending data to the API, which saves you a lot of API calls and rescuing the exception we throw when we get a 4xx/5xx response from the server (you can still get errors from the server; our implementation is not perfect. Also, Fortnox sometimes requires a specific combination of attributes).
Used to load, update, create and delete model instances. These are what is actually wrapping the HTTP REST API requests against Fortnox's server.
Repositories can throw Fortnox::API::RemoteServerError if something went wrong at Fortnox.
These are responsible for the mapping between our plain old Ruby object models and Fortnox JSON requests. The repositories use the mappers to map models to JSON requests and JSON to model instances when working with the Fortnox API, you will not need to use them directly.
This gem is build for Ruby 2.2 or higher, it's tested agains Ruby 2.2.5, 2.3.0 and 2.3.1. Since it uses the keywords argument feature and since Ruby 2.1 is officially outdated and unsupported it won't work on older versions.
If you want or need Ruby 1.9 compatibility please submit a pull request. Instructions can be found below :)
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'fortnox-api'And then execute:
$ bundleOr install it yourself as:
$ gem install fortnox-apiTo make calls to the API server you need a ClientSecret and an AccessToken. When you sign up for an API-account with Fortnox you should get a client secret and an authorization code. To get the access token, that is reusable, you need to do a one time exchange with the API-server and exchange your authorization code for an access token. This can be done in several ways but we provide a method for it in the gem that you can use.
:warning: Do not do this more than once! If you try to do the auth code/access token exchange more than once, regardless of method, it will lock your API-account! So if you get the token using curl or whatever do not use this method as well. If your account is not working and you think it might be due to this you will have to contact Fortnox support and have them reset the authorization code for you. If you want to use several access tokens, you need to use a new authorization code for each one of them!
# Load the special class from the gem. You need to install the gem first ofc.
require 'fortnox/api/access_token'
Fortnox::API::AccessToken.new(
base_url: 'https://api.fortnox.se/3',
client_secret: 'P5K5wE3Kun', # Replace with your client secret
authorization_code: 'ea3862b1-189c-464b-8e25-1b9702365fa1', # Replace with your auth code
):info: **This will be made into an executable part of the gem for version 1.0
This will output a new token like 3f08d038-f380-4893-94a0a0-8f6e60e67a that is your access token, save it! Set it in the environment by following the instructions in the next step.
The authentication for this gem is stored in the environment. See the documentation for your OS to get instructions for how to set environment variables in it.
You can choose to use the dotenv gem that we include for development but it is NOT recommended to use in production. You should set proper environment variables in production so you don't have to commit the environment file to source control.
The environment variables we use are:
FORTNOX_API_BASE_URL
FORTNOX_API_CLIENT_SECRET
FORTNOX_API_ACCESS_TOKENTheir values should match their name.
The gem only supports the latest API version, version 3, so base URL should be set to FORTNOX_API_BASE_URL=https://api.fortnox.se/3/ . Note that Fortnox requires https!
:info: ** FORTNOX_API_BASE_URL is deprecated and will be gone in version 1.0, it will be static in the gem instead.
Fortnox uses quite low API rate limits. The limit is for each access token, and according to Fortnox you can use as many tokens as you like to get around this problem. This gem supports multiple access tokens automatically. Just separate them with a comma: FORTNOX_API_ACCESS_TOKEN=a78d35hc-j5b1-ga1b-a1h6-h72n74fj5327,s2b45f67-dh5d-3g5s-2dj5-dku6gn26sh62 and the gem will automatically rotate between these tokens. In theory you can declare as many as you like. Remember that you will need one authorization code for each token! See Getting an AccessToken above.
Repositories are used to load,save and remove entities from the remote server. The calls are subject to network latency and are blocking. Do make sure to rescue appropriate network errors in your code.
# Instanciate a repository
repo = Fortnox::API::Repository::Customer.new
# Get a list of all the entities
repo.all #=> <Fortnox::API::Collection:0x007fdf2104575638 @entities: [<Fortnox::API::Customer::Simple:0x007fdf21033ee8>, <Fortnox::API::Customer::Simple:0x007fdf22994310>, ... ]
# Get entity by id
repo.find( 5 ) #=> <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x007fdf21100b00>
# Get entities by attribute
repo.find_by( customer_number: 5 ) #=> <Fortnox::API::Collection:0x007fdf22994310 @entities: [<Fortnox::API::Customer::Simple:0x007fdf22949298>]If you are eagle eyed you might have spotted the different classes for the entities returned in a collection vs the one we get from find. The Simple version of a class is used in thouse cases where the API-server doesn't return a full set of attributes for an entity. For customers the simple version has 10 attributes while the full have over 40.
:info: ** Collections not implemented yet.
You should try to get by using the simple versions for as long as possible. Both the Collection and Simple classes have a .full method that will give you full versions of the entities. Bare in mind though that a collection of 20 simple models that you run .full on will call out to the server 20 times, in sequence.
:info: ** We have opened a dialog with Fortnox about this API practice to allow for full models in the list request, on demand, and/or the ability for the client to specify the fields of interest when making the request, as per usual in REST APIs with partial load.
All the repository methods return instances or collections of instances of some resource class such as customer, invoice, item, voucher and so on.
Instances are immutable and any update returns a new instance with the appropriate attributes changed (see the Immutable section under Architecture above for more details). To change the properties of a model works like this:
customer #=> <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x007fdf228db310>
customer.name #=> "Nelly Bloom"
customer.update( name: "Ned Stark" ) #=> <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x0193a456ff0307>
customer.name #=> "Nelly Bloom"
updated_customer = customer.update( name: "Ned Stark" ) #=> <Fortnox::API::Model::Customer:0x0193a456fe3791>
updated_customer.name #=> "Ned Stark"The update method takes an implicit hash of attributes to update, so you can update as many as you like in one go.
See the CONTRIBUTE readme.