It has been a long while since we updated you all as to what we’ve added to OdataLink. There has been many enhancements to the platform. I’ll try to cover the more interesting one.
New setting to control the Archive Paging in OdataLink
The most recent addition and possibly the most impactful will be the addition to the Archive Paging setting of the model. This option allows you to control how data paging is done within OdataLink.
Previously, paging was controlled by your Xero or MYOB data file. With this option, you can choose whether to page the data by month or by year.
This new setting has the ability to increase the performance of your Odata Feed. You can find out more about it here.
This is but the first step in a major overhaul that deals with performance. In the near future, we plan on offering a new Hybrid Archive Type that combines both the option to have Live and Static options. In other words, you will be able to archive static data up to a specific date (say 30th of July 2023) and have live data onwards.
The Archive Paging fits as the first step, as the data needs to be paged by month or by year to gain that performance.
Enhancements to handle the Xero High Volume Threshold Limits
From 1st of September 2024, Xero will apply a new limit to the amount of data that can be downloaded at once. Many endpoints will be capped at 100,000 records.
While this will only affect a few of our users, we’ve enhanced OdataLink to inform users of this new type of error. We also provided an setting to still be able to access the data.
The Archive Paging, mentioned above also comes to the rescue by allowing to work around this limitation. You can read more about this on our help wiki site.
Major performance improvements
One of the bigger milestones we hit was a major set of performance improvements that took place under the hood.
The purpose of these improvements were two fold:
- reduce the pressure on our database servers
- prepare for the ability to have servers hosted in other regions
While these changes are invisible, they have made a huge impact.
Prior to the changes, serving archived data would take 1 to 2 seconds per call. This is now down to 0.1 second. This performance gain appears, for instance, when using the Developer or Static Archive Type (and the soon to come Hybrid Archive).
But it also had an impact for live calls, especially when multiple pages of data were requested, such as when downloading Invoices, Sales, Purchases or Journal Transactions. In those situations, it halved the time it took to serve all the data.
New MYOB Templates
We have also continued our push to add new templates, specifically for MYOB this time around. We only have a Profit and Loss and a Balance Sheet template in Power BI for MYOB at the moment, but there are many more in the works.
Our goal is to offer the same templates for both MYOB and Xero.
New Xero Endpoints
Finally for those that requested it, we have added the GetHistory set of endpoints for Xero.
These allow you to download the change logs of a single transaction in order to see who created it, who approved it, etc.
UI changes to the model page
We have also worked on the Model page to group options in a more logical way. Options are now broken by data file, security, performance and miscellaneous.
Hopefully, this will make understanding the purpose of the options a bit clearer.