We're working on integrating with a customer who only has our item name/numbers and I'm imagining it would slow the process to preform a search for each item name/number that comes in, in order to get the internal id.

I would recommend putting your internal id's in their system as an external id, otherwise no I don't think there is an easy way to set it on the item level without doing a lookup.

Got it, thank you!

But if the order volume is reasonable, a lookup hardly takes any time at all, so it shouldn't be a major concern.

depending on how your items are setup, Record.setSublistText may be an option

And no need to worry about performance issues? We'd be doing about 10 purchase orders a day with 15 line items each.

Assuming you are building this internally, you can get all the ID's on the PO in one search instead of doing a lookup for each item. So in that case, I would not worry about performing a single search to get 15 id's, no.

Got it, thanks for your help!

You may also want to consider just keeping that catalog that this vendor has in their system in yours as a custom record, and you could keep the id's in there by the name the vendor uses, might make that search a little easier to perform. Not sure if its worth the extra effort or not.

Their id's match our item external id's so it should be a fairly straightforward search.