Introduction
The purpose of this manual is to describe Basware API integration capabilities for Master data imports and Purchase-to-Pay integration scenarios. It contains process-level instructions, end-to-end data flows, as well as recommended practices for implementation and debugging.
Basware API is a REST API available through web service calls. JSON data format is used in the message payloads.
Basware API integrations are available for the following Basware end-systems.
- Basware Network
- Basware Purchase-to-Pay
- Basware Supplier Management
P2P APIs are available through the following regions: Europe (EU), USA (US) and Australia (AU). APIs will be set up in the same region as your P2P system. Separate environments are available for test and production systems.
List of available Purchase-to-Pay APIs
The following APIs are available for transferring invoices to accounting, importing master data, user data and external purchase orders for invoice matching, as well as for importing and exporting data to and from P2P Purchase.
| Importing master data | Available Basware systems |
|
| AdvancedValidations | Import invoice coding row validation rules from ERP | P2P |
| Accounts | Import accounts from ERP | P2P |
| CostCenters | Import cost centers from ERP | P2P |
| ExchangeRates | Import exchange rates from ERP | P2P |
| GenericLists | Import additional coding dimensions from ERP | P2P |
| PaymentTerms | Import payment terms from ERP | P2P |
| Projects | Import projects from ERP | P2P |
| TaxCodes | Import tax codes from ERP | P2P |
| Vendors | Import vendors from ERP | P2P, Supplier Management |
| Importing user master data | ||
| Users | Import users |
P2P, Supplier Portal, Supplier Management, Reporting, CloudScan 3.0 |
| ApplicationGroups | Control per-application log-in access (assigned to users). | P2P, Supplier portal, Supplier Management, Reporting, CloudScan 3.0 |
| AdvancedPermissions | Import user approval rights information | P2P |
| Importing external purchase orders for invoice matching | ||
| MatchingOrders | Import order header data into matching | P2P (AP Automation) |
| MatchingOrderLines | Import and update order lines and goods receipts into matching | P2P (AP Automation) |
| Importing and exporting procurement data for P2P Purchase | ||
| PurchaseRequisitions | Import purchase requisitions to P2P Purchase from an external system | P2P (Purchase) |
| PurchaseOrders | Import Purchase Orders to P2P Purchase from an external system | P2P (Purchase) |
| PurchaseGoodsReceipts | Import goods receipts to P2P Purchase from an external system | P2P (Purchase) |
| Contracts | Import contract metadata to P2P Purchase from an external system | P2P (Purchase) |
| ExportedPurchaseOrders | Export purchase orders and GR's from P2P Purchase | P2P (Purchase) |
| ExportedPurchaseRequisitions | Export purchase requisitions from P2P Purchase | P2P (Purchase) |
| Transferring approved invoices to accounting | ||
| AcccountingDocuments | Prebook invoices or transfer approved invoices to accounting system | P2P (AP Automation) |
| Acknowledge | Mark invoice as fetched | P2P (AP Automation) |
| PrebookResponse | Mark invoice as prebooked in accounting system | P2P (AP Automation) |
| TransferResponses | Mark invoice as transferred to accounting system | P2P (AP Automation) |
| PaymentResponses | Update invoice payment date | P2P (AP Automation) |
| Retrieving API request status / errors |
||
| RequestStatus (new API) | Check target system status of sent requests. Asynchronously returns success and error messages from target systems. Replaces errorFeedbacks API. | P2P, Supplier portal, Supplier Management |
| ErrorFeedbacks | Error handling. Returns errors asynchronously from Basware receiving systems. | P2P |
Supported methods for Basware APIs
API methods and fields
Detailed documentation for available methods and field sets for each API are described in the P2P API reference documentation.
Basware APIs support the following methods.
POST - Adds or updates records. Clears existing data from omitted fields
POST method updates the record based on externalCode field. If no record is found with given externalCode, a new record is created. All fields are updated within the record. Existing data in fields is cleared before the update.
PATCH - Updates records. Preserves existing data in omitted fields
PATCH method updates the record based on externalCode field. Difference to POST is that only fields included in the JSON in the request are updated. Data fields not explicitly included in the JSON request are left unchanged.
GET - Gets records from Basware API
GET method lists the records for a particular interface. Returned data contains all JSON fields and their values for the returned records. An externalCode can be specified as parameter to return data for only the specified record.
DELETE - Deletes records from Basware API
DELETE method deletes records from Basware API. The records are deleted from API only. To delete the records also from the data receiving Basware systems, use the data deletion mechanisms provided by each of the Basware receiving systems.
Data update scenarios
Below is an illustration of system behaviour in various data update scenarios.
Push notifications
Push notifications are available for pilot use starting from August 2021.
To receive push notifications, customer needs to publish a webservice which receives notifications in a predefined format. These notifications trigger customer system to fetch documents from Basware API, which enables near real-time transfer of documents. To register for pilot use, please contact Basware product management through your consultant(s).
Data export notifications are available for the following APIs. When notification is received, you can immediately retrieve data from the same API(s) as would be polled otherwise.
-
- accountingDocuments
- exportedPurchaseOrders
- exportedPurchaseRequisitions
- requestStatus
Subscribing to push notifications
Receiving the notifications requires customer to publish a webservice which receives task notifications in below JSON format. This webservice needs to be accessible from public Internet. Each nofitication is signed a using secret key which is self-service changeable by customer.
[
{
"taskId": "sajkhe1i87yhdgdi6sad7iyahljh1ut1",
"taskStatus": "New",
"taskType": "AccountingDocuments",
"taskSubtype": "WaitingForTransfer",
"documentId": "sajkhe1i87yhdgdi6sad7iyahljh1ut1",
}
]When the webservice to receive notifications is up and running, customer can subscribe to receive webhook notifications. This is done by specifying your webhook endpoint address as well as details on which notifications you want to receive through a subscription API.
When subscribing, Basware API will verify the endpoint by posting a test notification with taskType 'ConnectionTest'. Customer system needs to return a 200 'OK' HTTP response to this request for the subscription endpoint to be validated. When subscribed, notifications for any new API tasks will be sent to your specified webservice address.
Recommended usage patterns
When you receive a notification, you should do a GET request to the interface specified by the notification's (field 'taskType'). Since one GET operation can return multiple documents and new notifications may arrive before the GET operation finishes, Basware recommends following usage patterns.
Usage pattern 1: GET multiple documents in a single thread (recommended)
- Start the thread for fetching documents when a webhook notification is received.
- If a thread is already running, do not start another one before the thread completes in order to to prevent receiving same documents twice. Instead, start the new thread after task has completed in order to fetch any remaining documents.
- Use acknowledge or lastUpdated to get the next round of documents.
- Have a (nightly) task which polls for new documents in order to prevent missing documents due to network or other issues.
Usage pattern 2: Get each document by documentId
Usage pattern 2: GET invoices one by one using the invoiceId provided in the notification.- GET each invoice individually by invoiceId as soon as the notification arrives.
- Have a (nightly) task which polls for new documents in order to prevent missing documents due to network or other issues.
- Note: Sending webhook notifications is not retried, but you can use the 'tasks' API to check for any notifications whose delivery has failed.
Validating notification signature
In order to secure your webhook endpoints, which receive calls from Basware, Basware signs the webhook events it sends to your endpoints by including a signature in each request’s header. This allows you to verify that the event requests were sent by Basware and not by an unauthorized third party. Here is how to validate the signature with example payload contents.
Request header parameter 'x-bwapi-signature-256':
Name: x-bwapi-signature-256
Value: t=1629118316,v1=55258f455c0c0427527679626967148475a12d68b19248b69a903a9970b35a02
JSON payload:
[{"taskId": "1a2ee1c0-d0ab-486d-8da6-95a8d4ac37ce", "taskStatus": "New", "taskType": "AccountingDocuments", "taskSubType": "WaitingForTransfer", "documentId": "3661018bdfe24eeea2ec271a45eca5b4", "expirationTime": null}]
Validation instructions:
- Read request header parameter 'x-bwapi-signature-256'.
- 't=1629118316' indicates the timestamp (in epoch format). Timezone: UTC.
- 'v1=55258f455c0c0427527679626967148475a12d68b19248b69a903a9970b35a02' contains the signature.
- Check notification timestamp
- Compare timestamp t=1629118316 to current datetime. Reject the notification if it is too old.
- Useful tool for converting the time: https://www.epochconverter.com/
- Calculate signature from request payload
- Create a string in format TIMESTAMP.NOTIFICATION_PAYLOAD
- Example: 1629118316.[{"taskId": "1a2ee1c0-d0ab-486d-8da6-95a8d4ac37ce", "taskStatus": "New", "taskType": "AccountingDocuments", "taskSubType": "WaitingForTransfer", "documentId": "3661018bdfe24eeea2ec271a45eca5b4", "expirationTime": null}]
- Calculate HMAC-SHA256 hash from the generated string using pre-specific secret key.
- The secret key has been specified by customer when subscribing to receive push notifications through /v1/subscriptions API. The key is specified in field 'webhookAuthenticationToken' in /v1/subscriptions API. It can be changed at any time by updating the subscription. Values used in this example below:
- Secret key: ad65rujltr9093ijhdkutiyua09döijhsa76d8799w8pqugdfafjdhfkjhadls
- Resulting hash using above example values: 55258f455c0c0427527679626967148475a12d68b19248b69a903a9970b35a02
- Note the resulting hash is the same as in 'v1' on the header parameter.
- Useful tool for calculating the signature: https://www.devglan.com/online-tools/hmac-sha256-online
- The secret key has been specified by customer when subscribing to receive push notifications through /v1/subscriptions API. The key is specified in field 'webhookAuthenticationToken' in /v1/subscriptions API. It can be changed at any time by updating the subscription. Values used in this example below:
- Create a string in format TIMESTAMP.NOTIFICATION_PAYLOAD
- Compare the calculated signature with value given in header parameter
- Get value from 'X-BWAPI-Signature-256' header parameter, field 'v1'.
- Reject the notification if the values are different.
- Else accept the notification.
Note: Webhook payloads may contain unicode characters in the future. If your language and server implementation specifies a character encoding, ensure that you handle the payload as UTF-8.
Usage scenario 1: Import master data
Basware solutions require a set of master data that replicate the Customer’s business model in Basware. This data is required to enhance the processing of business documents and makes it possible to bring all, or suitable parts of the validation logic to Basware.
As best practice, master data should be maintained in one central place. This data nearly always sits in an organization’s main ERP system. Basware API is designed for importing master data to Basware services from your central master data store(s). Master data can be made available in all supported Basware services.
Posting and updating basic records
The following diagram illustrates data flow for posting master data, such as basic data records and user data, to Basware API.
This is applicable for the following entity types (APIs): Accounts, AdvancedPermissions, AdvancedValidations, ApplicationGroups, Contracts, CostCenters, ExchangeRates, GenericLists, PaymentTerms, Projects, TaxCodes, Vendors.
POST operation must be used when first sending the record to Basware API. Records can be updated using both POST and PATCH operations. Basware recommends using POST operation to also update the records for most cases. PATCH may be more suitable when, for example, the sending system provides only the changed fields within the modified record.
Note that GenericLists API can be used to populate several different lists. The list key needs to be specified as additional parameter for this API.
Usage scenario 2: Import external purchase orders for Order Matching
In order matching a purchase order, purchase order line, or a goods receipt is linked to an invoice or invoice line. Basware API supports importing external Purchase orders from customer systems to order matching. Purchase orders, purchase order lines and goods receipts can be imported and updated using Basware API.
These orders need to be fully processed, approved, and marked received in external systems. These orders are called matching orders and they are used only for automatic matching to received invoices. Creating, approving and sending orders can be also done in Basware P2P using "Purchase" module, which has another set of APIs to integrate the purchasing process with external purchasing systems (see section "Usage scenario 4: Import and export procurement data").
Posting and updating matching orders
The following diagram illustrates data flow for transferring and updating order data for use in invoice matching. Purchase orders from external systems are received through the MatchingOrders (order headers) and MatchingOrderLines (order lines and goods receipts) API entity types.
Order header needs to be received before the order lines are sent. Both order headers and order lines can be updated through API when they are changed, for example when changing requested delivery date or when items have been received.
Order data validations
There are validations performed on order data. Expand below section to list the validations.
Below diagram describes the main flow in terms of invoice status transitions in AccountingDocuments API.
Below diagram describes the available statuses in exception situations. Some of the exception statuses are currently reserved for future use. These are in grey and there is no interaction path leading to those statuses at the moment. Retransferring an invoice from P2P will start the invoice process again as in the main flow above. Note: If a prebooked invoice is returned, prebook cancellation may need to be triggered in ERP system from 'WaitingToBeReturned' status. Most returned invoices are reprocessed and retransferred again to ERP.
The following diagram illustrates the data flow for retrieving prebooked or approved invoices (AccountingDocuments) from Basware P2P to accounting and handling related response messages.
Usage scenario 4: Import and export procurement data
The procurement subset of APIs is used to integrate Basware Purchase with external purchasing systems. These APIs are not used to import orders for matching. For matching please see Usage scenario 2: Import external purchase orders for Matching. Basware Purchase handles the procurement process. It allows users to approve the purchase requisition, sends created order(s) out to supplier(s), handles any changes done in ordering phase and allows documenting that goods have been received. Orders created in Basware Purchase are also automatically available for invoice matching along with the documented goods receipts.
Procurement data integrations scenarios
- Basware API currently supports importing purchase requisition draft(s) to a specified owner on valid organization. The imported data is pre-validated by Basware Purchase making sure that document contains sufficient data required by purchase process setup. Purchase requisition can contain lines to many suppliers. Result of requisition approval process (requisition approved or cancelled) can be retrieved from Basware API as an exported purchase requisition.
- Basware API also supports importing purchase orders. Purchase orders (single supplier) are already approved before importing so they bypass approval process and are automatically sent to supplier.
- Basware Purchase supports contract based purchasing. Contract metadata can be imported through Basware API contract import. Contracts link buyer and supplier in requisition.
- Orders sent to suppliers can be exported from exported purchase orders API. Whenever the order status changes, the data in API is also updated.
- Basware API exported purchase orders also include goods receipts when they are registered in Basware Purchase. The goods receipts can originate from Basware API goods receipt import or Basware Purchase goods receiving UI action.
Below picture illustrates available purchase document flows. The operations between P2P and purchasing system are performed using Basware API.
APIs for importing procurement data:
Importing procurement data is done in similar manner as master data imports. See Usage scenario 1: Import Master data for more details.
APIs for exporting procurement data:
Exporting procurement data is done in a similar manner to invoice transfer (Usage Scenario 3: Prebook and transfer invoices to Accounting). Exported data is made available in the exportedPurchaseOrders / exportedPurcahseRequisitions APIs. Export is confirmed by sending an acknowledgement response. Orders which have been acknowledged are marked as 'Exported' and can be filtered out from the get next request.
Usage scenario 5: Error handling and monitoring
You can check request status from end-systems (which receive data asynchronously) through ‘requestStatus’ API. When you POST records to Basware API, the posted data contents are schema validated on API layer and then distributed asynchronously to one or more target system(s).
In case an error occurs when target system(s) process the record, it will be returned through 'requestStatus' API. This API can be queried to check status of a request POSTed to Basware API. Errors returned by target systems are typically data validation errors that cannot be validated on the API layer. Examples of such errors would be "Company not found in target system" or "Cannot resolve username 'JOHNSMITH' to a valid purchase requisition owner". You can choose to query only errors or also success' responses. Retrieving only the errors should be enough for most use cases. Success responses indicate that the request has been succesfully processed in all of the target systems. If this does not occur within three hours, an error response is returned.
There is also an older 'errorFeedbacks' API, which returns only errors from P2P ('success' responses are not available). The 'errorFeedbacks' API is likely to be deprecated at a later time. There will be a 12 months notice period before eventual deprecation. Currently both APIs are functioning side by side and are returning same errors.
Retrieving request status messages from requestStatus API
Do a GET to 'requestStatus' API in order to retrieve target system processing status(es) for a POSTed request. Most often the request status response will be available within less than one minute. There are some conditions, such as a heavy initial data loads, where this can take longer. If there is no response from a target system within two hours, the request is set to ’Error’ status automatically. Checking this is done hourly, so max time until timeout is just below three hours.
Request status is shown as 'error' if one or more of the POSTed records could not be imported to one or more of the target systems. Note that you need to query the API separately for both 'success' and 'error' statuses. If parameter 'status' is not used in the GET requestStatus query, the API defaults to returning only messages which have received 'error' status. Basware recommends following ways to programmatically query the API.
Option 1: GET by status + acknowledge
- Get by statuses: 'error', 'success'.
- This needs to be done in two GET requests.
- POST acknowledge for all requestIds (to which status response is received)
- Acknowledged status responses are no longer offered on the next GET request.
- Acknowledging changes the status: 'Error' -> 'AcknowledgedError', 'Success' -> 'AcknowledgedSuccess'.
- Repeat from step 1.
Option 2: GET by lastUpdated timestamp.
- GET with 'lastUpdated' timestamp
- Include a stored 'lastUpdated' timestamp in GET request. Get by statuses: 'error', 'success'.
- This needs to be done in two GET requests.
- Store the 'lastUpdated' timestamp locally.
- Store the latest 'lastUpdated' timestamp separately for 'error' and 'success' statuses.
- Repeat from step 1.
Option 3: Get by requestId
- Save the returned requestId when doing a POST/PATCH request to Basware API
- RequestId is returned as a header parameter in response message.
- Query the API using the requestId until a response is received.
Basware recommends doing GET requestStatus 1 minute after sending a request. If several requests are sent over time, you can do GET requestStatus once a minute until the last request has been sent. It's also a good practice to additionally poll requestStatus API every 10..60 minutes to receive responses for potentially long-running requests. If status responses to all request have been received, this polling can be stopped until a new request is sent to Basware API.
[Legacy] Retrieving error messages from errorFeedbacks API
Note: The 'errorFeedbacks' API has been replaced by 'requestStatus' API and is likely to be deprecated at a later time. There will be a 12 months notice period before eventual deprecation. Currently both APIs are functioning side by side and are returning same errors.
In case an error occurs while using an API an error message is returned either in the API response message or through the ErrorFeedbacks API.
Errors from data validation in Basware API are returned immediately in the API response. These are mainly errors resulting from data structure validation and simple validations on data values.
Errors occurring when data is distributed from Basware API to the receiving Basware systems are returned asynchronously through the ErrorFeedbacks API. These include errors from validations performed in the receiving systems.
The following diagram illustrates data flow for receiving error messages.
Recommended practice is to query the errorFeedbacks API using the timestamp of the last error that has been retrieved. This will return any new errors that have occurred since the last time errors have been fetched. Errors will become available in the API at the same time as the receiving Basware systems process data. Most requests will be processed within 60 seconds. If there is considerable load errorFeedbacks will be available only after the receiving Basware systems have finished processing the data.
Usage scenario 6: Import companies
Importing companies is a network-only usage scenario (companies cannot be imported to P2P). Companies are imported through the 'companies' API. The sequence of API messages is same as when posting master data records.
The company identifier type (field identifiers.schemeId) needs to be specified from available values. Please expand the element under the flow diagram for a table of available values.
Available company identifier types
Expand below section to list available company identifier types used in companies API.
Usage Scenario 7: Import users
Users can be imported through the 'users' API. It is possible to import user(s) to any of the following Basware applications: Purchase-To-Pay (P2P), Supplier portal (network), Supplier Management (network), Network, CloudScan 3.0 (available Q1/2021). The log-in-to-application rights are managed through both 'users' and 'applicationGroups' APIs.
Before importing users, you need to have one or more application Group(s) set up for the users. Application groups provide log-in access to applications when applicationGroups are assigned to users. Each user contains a section specifying which applicationGroups the user has access to. After the application groups are set up, POST user(s) while specifying their assigned applicationGroups.
If some of your end users require access to more Basware systems than other users, you will need to define multiple applicationGroups. An example of this would be access to P2P and Vendor management for some users while most users access only P2P. If you need to define invoice approval rights for users on coding row level, you can also import these using 'advancedPermissions' API.
Note: If you are not importing users from scratch but have an existing P2P tenant where users have already been created, it is still possible to move user maintenance to Basware API. See FAQ article "Can I migrate user maintenance to users API on an existing P2P tenant" for what needs to be taken into consideration.
API testing guidelines
This section aims to support creating your API implementation test plan as well as to provide guidelines on how to test. Please select the scenarios applicable to your implementation onto your test plan, as well as add customer-specific cases. While going through the scenarios, notice which ones you understand and clarify the ones you're not sure about with your consultants.
In a typical integration scenario, there are two or three actors: The customer, a Basware product consultant, and an ERP system consultant. There may also be an external company building the integration. Ideally the integration is verified before customer testing workshop(s) to work from a technical point of view and customer focuses on verifying the business logic of the integration.
As the integration endpoint(s) integrating with Basware API are generally custom built, it is important to verify the applicable scenarios to ensure smooth end-to-end functioning of the overall integration in production.
Use cases for testing
Click on below section(s) to view related test cases. The tables can be copy/pasted to Excel for easy tracking of scenarios.
