From Developer Community

by exteNd Composer Product Team, eBusiness Integration Products, Novell
Date Created: 2001-12-18 15:36:00.000

EDI standards have continued to evolve since their inception and there are now numerous versions of each of the major standards. The naming structures for the two standards also differ. For example, an ANSI X12 document which uses a version/release/subrelease structure (e.g., Version 3, Release 6, Subrelease 2 is designated "003062." When commonly referring to releases and subreleases, the first two zeros of the code are dropped and "003062" becomes "3062."). Currently there are versions of ANSI X12 from Version 2 release 1 or "2010" through Version 4 release 5 or "4050". In contrast, EDIFACT uses the last two figures of the year of agreement and a third figure. So there are versions ranging from 88-1 through 01b documented and possibly in use.

Things get even more complex when you look at what is actually used between customers. While the standard message for an ANSI X12 850 (Purchase Order) or an EDIFACT ORDER (also a Purchase Order) contains a superset of everything that business may want to exchange, in reality no one implements these full standards. Rather they use what is termed an Implementation Guideline or subset of the standard document. These can vary by trading partner even within a standard and need to be created for businesses to understand what information is being exchanged and how to use the information.

Many of the tools that assist customers in generating these implementation guidelines can produce what is termed a Standard Exchange Format or SEF file as a by-product of the documentation. Where these are available, Composer provides the ability to import the SEF format to create an implementation specific set of metadata. The problem is what happens when an SEF description is not available for a standard in use.

For those situations you can find metadata (??? where do I find the metadata ???) that describes the "Standard". These files are XML based and can be edited to create the implementation specific metadata files.

Below are links to Zip files, which contain Resource Projects for EDI. With the implementation of subprojects in Composer 3.0 we have chosen to make these available as full projects so that you can download and add the information to your current project as a subproject rather than having to import or copy each file.

Each zipfile contains a Project, which has Metadata for a Full EDI Standard. There is also a zip file containing ANSI X12 HIPAA Implementation guidelines.

Recommended process to use this metadata:

1. Create a new directory for the zipped EDI project you are interested in.
2. Unzip the zipfile to this Project Directory.
3. Assign this Project as a sub-project to the project that will use the EDI standard.
4. Copy the "Standard" Metadata and refine for specific implementation.

Notes:

1. A set of Metadata for a Whole Standard is VERY LARGE. The likelihood is that any given project will only use a subset of the Documents and that each document will only use a subset of the segments in the full standard for that document.
2. ANSIX12 4010 and 3030 have been split into two sets, one with descriptions in the metadata, the second without.
3. HIPAA is a subset of the ANSIX12 4010 Standard it contains the 12 implementation guidelines of documents defined by HIPAA.

Visit http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?composeredi to download the files.

• Article
• Discussion
• Edit
• History

Personal tools