TntMPD.DataServer is designed to work with virtually any donation or accounting system. The goal is to make it easy as possible to integrate with many different systems. TntMPD.DataServer already includes many Data Source Templates for various systems. When it does not include a template for your specific system, tools are included to allow for the building of a custom template.
Data Sources
The connection to your donation or accounting system is made through a "data source". A data source contains all the information needed to locate and connect to the database. Data sources in TntMPD.DataServer are based on Microsoft OLE DB technology. OLE DB is an API designed by Microsoft for accessing different types of data stores in a uniform manner. This allows connections to virtually any database system.
Source Scanners
TntMPD.DataServer defines many "data targets" which relate loosely to the actual data that TntMPD.DataServer stores a copy of. Data targets define many target fields that can be imported into. Some fields are required, some are optional. For each data target you choose to implement a source scanner for, you must define a query to run against a data source. This "source query" should return records that can be used to populate the data target. A field mapping must be defined to link the fields from the source query to the target fields.
Rescanning
Since TntMPD.DataServer keeps a copy of your data, it must be frequently refreshed. For some source queries it may acceptable in terms of performance to simply return all the source rows every time. But consider donation information, as an example. You may have millions of donations records, so running a query that returns every donation record would be extremely inefficient to run every day. Therefore, TntMPD.DataServer supports different methods of limiting the scan range of subsequent running of the source queries.
Working Together...
Tools are also included to make it easy to share your final template with others. By sharing your template with TntWare, you help other organizations. Please contact Troy Wolbrink (troy.wolbrink@ccci.org) if you'd like to share your template with TntWare. Your template may be included in future releases of the application and made available to everyone.