EDI introduction and Basic Concepts

Hi Folks,

As promised, I am here to share the first learning experience with you. With the new project that I am assigned to is going to utilize the Base EDI adapter of biztalk as our partner will be sending us the file ( this is first time) in EDI format - I am supposed to be learn EDI in a week and implement a robust solution for the partners. So, Here is my first take on the EDI document what its structure and format is . I will be taking X12 format as this is the one that I am learning now.

So here is EDI:



What is EDI?

As you folks know how much the organisation loves flat file and excel report and there is new entrant to this group known as XML. But Do you have thought of how much size a file takes and actually how much data its contains. For eg. in the case of XML If you want to send just a Person Name you will need to decorate it with TAGS and they will take the 95% of total size of your file.So to reduce the file size and transfer data over wire considering the huge size of data and the bandwidth of the network, the Internet messaging communities has come up with this new standards of message formatting called as EDI either X12 or EDIFACT.

These EDI messages contains less metadata and more data itself. They will still use the FTP or HTTP protocol to transfer messages and the messages will be stored in the Flat File but the format of the message will be as define by X12 or EDIFACT.

So, after such a long story you must have understood that EDI is a new kid around the block which is used to format message, it can be stored in flat file and transferred over the wire using any of existing transfer protocols.



How an EDI message looks like ?

Here is an eg. taken from one of the blogs:



A basic X12 EDI message following tags:

ISA --Interchange Header Segment

GS --Group Header Segment

ST --Transaction set header

- -Data Segments

SE -- Transaction set trailer

GE - Group Trailer segment

ISE -- Interchange Trailer segment

For X12 documents, the segment ISA GS are considered as Header segment and GE and ISE are the trailer segment corresponds to the footer and all lines between the header and footer is the actual data.
In the next post I will give detail of each element inside the Interchange Header....

What you will get here

Hi Everyone,

I am starting this thread to capture my learning's in BizTalk as developer and share my thoughts and doubts which a novice developer usually faces. These are the learning steps that I had taken to troubleshoot my problem while handling a GIANT namely BizTalk 2006. I am also planning to upgrade myself to BizTalk 2009 (yes, Its true now you don't upgrade your machine you upgrade yourself), I will writing post for that also. So, guys be ready to post your queries and Idea to my blog.

Thanks

KN