EDI Development

[J.J.Johnstone]

Are there any suggested reading materials or web sites to learn how to convert data to EDI formats Ansi X12 / XML etc. After a search of this forum I did see there was component available from EdiDev.com but was hoping to learn the concepts for myself.

[BramVandenbon]

There's an opensource project on this ...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/osedi/

I don't know if it is any help, ... it's been in an alpha stadium for the last 3 years.

[techgnome]

Creating EDI documents is actually quite easy. They are simply structured flat files, with headers and record markers. The trick is figuring out how to put it all together in an acceptable format. This requires weeding through a ton of documentation and being able to make any sense of it..... And a lot of that depends on the industry, companies, and even the state. I've been weeding through the NY specification for the Energy industry for almost a year now, and I'm just now getting the hang of reading the documents (which is good, because now I need to move into the Calif market.)

As for EDI -> XML -> EDI .... we go through an EDI vendor for that - they take the file from the source and translate it through into an XML format that we can process. And they do the reverse for us going back to EDI as well.

It was cheaper than us trying to parse the raw EDI docs ourselves.

-tg