Inserting entities from outside of Nop

Hi there,

I'm just wondering if anyone has discussed or already come up with the best way to insert Customers or Products (for example) from an application outside of Nop, i.e. a Windows Service. The scenario I'm currently at is one of our customers wants to send us their customer info and product info in the form of an export from their accounting system (this is fine, the xml format is easy to work with etc, everything is there). But, we need this to run on a Windows Service as it will be periodically checking an FTP area for new customer/product feed files, which will in turn be updating or inserting new customers and products.

I have considered referencing the core lirbraries and using those but the project is so big, I'm not sure of the related dependencies and how all the rules are enforced, i.e. Customer Passwords... how are those encrypted and where is the Salt Key generated.

Any ideas/discussions are welcome.

**Using Nop 2.65 for relevance **

Kind Regards

I'm interested in this too...

short of digging through the source code, I haven't found anything promising yet.

You could also create a plugin as a scheduled task (ITask).  From in there you can do the import, or call an import service.  

There is no built-in import for XML, but you could create a new plugin, or add it to existing ExportImport service code.
(If you used xlsx rather than xml, you could just call existing module)

There is no built-in customer Import.  You can build your own by copying how customers are created in Admin
\src\Presentation\Nop.Web\Administration\Controllers\CustomerController.cs

Perhaps create a plugin that implements a RESTful service to do the insertion? This can be a cool idea. :P

Thanks for the ideas, I think the ITask sounds best to me; I will give this a go and post any useful solutions on here; I might publish the plugin if it proves a success.

Thanks