Access and EDI 1

[CMooreJr]

Hey all....I have been asked to create a database that pulls data from an EDI database. I have not used or even looked at an EDI database. Does anyone know if Access can Link to these tables? I do know that EDI scripting is cryptic at best, and I need to let the client know if this is even possible....

Thanks!

 

[MichaelRed]

"EDI" is a rather broad 'term'. Each Industry Group using EDI is responsible for setting up it's own standards for the details of each Document which that Industry Group supports. While, in theory, they have a common approach, the Industry Group which sets the standard often (usually) has a proprietary interest in the use of the information and often does not release this to the publuc domain. If your potential client has (or will pay for) the complete standard for the industry group of interest, then the various Documents may be encoded/decoded according to the standards for the documnet. I have delved into the construction of the two or three most basic Documents for the publishing industry and can assure you that the routines to translate between dbland and EDIland are quite doable and a large pain (somewhere).

You mention " ... pulls data from an EDI database ...", so the problem is somewhat mis-stated, as EDI is not a database. It is based on standards which are more like HTML than anything resembling "data", so each line of each Documents must be parsed to determine what kind of "record" the line represents; What "fields" are included in the Line (pseudo record) and what the value of the field is. Many records and fields within records are optional, so all lines/records are variable length.

Further compounding the issues, in some industries, it APPEARS that sub groups have variations on the standard, which they regard as proprietary.



MichaelRed
m.red@att.net

Searching for employment in all the wrong places

 

[estrassm]

You may want to look at the MS product called BizTalk - I think that they have a "converter" and also a company called Data Junction. Reading the EDI files is a PITA.

 

[cmmrfrds]

I did an EDI application in Access to interpret the inbound and outbound transactions. It was a lot of work and took a significant number of hours. The transactions types I handled were the 810 invoice, 850 PO, 867, and 855. The inbound 810 was converted to a MAS90 import file format and the MAS90 export was converted to an outbound 850 PO. It is doable and I concur it is PITA. Michael Red gave an very good general explanation and worth a star.