eConnect “Customer is Inactive, you must Activate the customer to enter transactions”

Started looking at the eConnect integration with one of our websites today. We get the following error when the customer has been marked as inactive. Inactive in our world is something the finance department quantity, however we obviously want to still accept sales and ask questions later.

The problem is when the customer places the order we get the eConnect error which makes business sense,

WebDocumentTransport.FileProcessingException: Error processing order: 39646 ---> System.Exception: Microsoft.GreatPlains.eConnect.eConnectException: Sql procedure error codes returned: Error Number = 1790 Stored Procedure taSopHdrIvcInsert Error Description = Customer is Inactive, you must Activate the customer to enter transactions Node Identifier Parameters: taSopHdrIvcInsert SOPNUMBE = 3899646 SOPTYPE = 2 Related Error Code Parameters for Node : taSopHdrIvcInsert CUSTNMBR = TEST

First I checked to see if there was a field in the XML that overrides this behaviour, there was not so next I thought I could use the econnect pre and post stored procedures to get around this. The procedures, taSopHdrIvcInsertPre and taSopHdrIvcInsertPost, supposedly run before and after the document is processed.

As I was seeking a simple rapid solution, I bunged some TSQL in to stash away the customer status if it was inactive, set customer as active and then restore the status afterwards in the post procedure.

Annoyingly this does not work. The taSopHdrIvcInsertPre never executes if the customer in inactive. I guess the error occurs before econnect hands off to taSopHdrIvcInsertPre. I admit this seems like a acceptable behaviour, just not the one I was seeking.

So looks like I have run the SQL procedures I wrote, before and after the sales document is created myself. Alternatively I have to go back to plan A that was to do the change through eConnect itself that might be the more correct way to handle this anyway.