Is it possible to do a wildcard search for customer names in IPP QBO?

Question

The documentation here and here seems to be saying that I can only filter strings with exact matches "Supported Operators for Strings :EQUALS:"

I'm using the IPP .NET Devkit so my search looks like this:

CustomerQuery qboCustomerQuery = new CustomerQuery();
qboCustomerQuery.Name = "Southwest";
List<Customer> customers = qboCustomerQuery.ExecuteQuery<Customer>(context).ToList<Customer>();

However I need to find a customer name that contains "Southwest" in it. Is my only choice really to cache the customer names locally and search my own db? This seems asinine. Please tell me I'm being an idiot and that this system isn't really this obviously broken.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the Intuit Anywhere APIs really are this crappy at the moment. :-(

Here is the list of filter operations that are supported for strings: https://ipp.developer.intuit.com/0010_Intuit_Partner_Platform/0050_Data_Services/0400_QuickBooks_Online/0100_Calling_Data_Services/0030_Retrieving_Objects#Supported_Filter_Operators

Note that the only one supported is:

:EQUALS:

Ick!

Fortunately, Intuit is hard at work on the v3 APIs. It was rumored that v3 will support better filtering.

Unfortunately, Intuit is doing their usual thing and not involving developers in the v3 dev process anymore, so we really won't know whether or not v3 is going to suck until it's actually released. sigh You'll notice the last update about v3 data services was in October by Wei... unfortunately Wei isn't even on that team at Intuit anymore, so who knows what the status is, or even if there's anyone at all working on v3 anymore at Intuit.

Answer 2

I had to do something similar. Sadly, as Keith pointed out, it is not yet supported. What I ended up doing with this was fall back on LINQ.

I read in all of the customers, and then filtered using LINQ. This prevented me from having to write and read from a db and speed things up by keeping the data in memory.

So, for now, try LINQ. Hopefully we will get a better solution when v3 comes out.