Conversion to EDI

I have some work for a client that involves the following, all in VB.NET:

We have to transfer data from spreadsheets to EDI, which involves:

a service to watch incoming emails and save the attachments to disk
a service to move them into the DB
a service to export EDI data once a day (or some time period)

So far we are planning on writing all these from scratch, including formatting the data in EDI 850 format. I know that one solution could be BizTalk, but, for the cost of it, it's prohibitive right now for them.

Has anyone had any expierence with this kind of work in .NET? I know that there are some components for sale used to create the EDI format, but we of course would like a homegrown solution. I just figured I would post in case anyone had any good ideas on the best way to proceed.

Thanks for your time!

Jeremy Callinan
http://www.protocol80.com

To be quite honest, BizTalk Server 2004 would actually save you a lot of money!
The partner Edition of BTS is about 1k $ per CPU and you get some EDI functionality out of the box. If thats not enough you could still add the Covast EDI accelerator for another 1k$. It would reduce your total cost of ownership, provide scalability, tracking, business activity monitoring,.....

if you want to have some more detailed Information about the BizTalk Server 2004 just PM me.

Stephan

jcallinan, I have had to do this in the past and its not too bad. Essentially EDI files are just text files that are formatted to match some standard. The hardest part is making sure your EDI output conforms to the standards of the company you are transmitting the EDI to. They may say it is 850, but I have seen many companies who say they use an EDI format (such as 850), but they have their own little tweaks that do not conform to the standard.

I have created an app in vb.net which looks for a file to come into through our EDI connection and transform its format to user friendly format.

When I test the app by click-and-dragging a test file into the folder the app works. when I ask our business client to send a file the app does not work.

I am using event handlers and systemfilewatcher to announce a file being created and begin the app.

can anyone give me a hint as to why this is so. I very much appreciate it in advance.

thanks
ronze

Could it be that the file is locked and not completely downloaded yet? You may watch for the lastwrite (i think) and make sure the file has not changed in a minute or two.

yes, I had that problem earlier and figured I could loop with a delay until I can finally open the file, at which point I exit the loop and resume.

waiting a minute or two would not be fair for smaller files and probably not enough for very large files.

I'm currently listening for lastwrite (took off lastaccess because of virus scans), directoryname and filename.

I am doing some investigation and I think it has something to do with the delivery methods. for some reason i think the file gets created in a way as to "blind" my event handler on this folder.... that is a totally shot in the dark but it is what i am leaning towards.

thanks for your reply, i really appreciate it!
ronze