EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) with ASP/VBS?

[csteinhilber]

A client has requested that we communicate ordering information to their central server via EDI.

From what I've read, it looks like EDI is primarily a webservice, but I haven't been able to gather much more than that.

Has anyone dealt with EDI from within classic ASP using VBScript? Is it possible? Are there server components that are needed, or is it truly just a SOAP webservice? Might anybody have any examples?

Thanks in advance,
-Carl

 

[rac2]

Before there was the internet there was EDI. Different industries defined various standard documents or message formats for computer-to-computer business transactions, and typically using transmissions on private networks. A Web Service is a variety of EDI which uses the internet and more flexible documents in the SOAP format.

You really need to talk to your business partner about this, it might well be that they mean "Web Service" when they say "EDI", but it could be something else.

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Data_Interchange

.

 

[Tarwn]

While it would be possible to write some portion of you own system in VBScript, it would likely be much more expensive, especially the first time they decide to change a field.

EDI is primarily a formatted line of text. It is similar to SOAP in that it does have an "envelope" and "contents". But there is no restriction on how the data is transferred and rather than using the tag format, EDI uses a combination of fixed length fields (for the header/footer) and named sections that use field delimiters.

There are many, many standards for EDI, some customer specific some not. Even with standards, some customers will want you to use only a specific subset of fields, while others will want all the fields in a given standard.

My advice would definitely be to buy a product to handle the EDI for you, or purchase service from a gateway. A single EDI file doesn't have to be that complex, but once you start managing multiple files, the acknowledgments that are required, ten million standards, etc. you will wish you had purchased an application that let you build the mappings yourself.
Don't worry, even with an application there will still be a lot of work involved to integrate the system with your financial/sales/warehouse system.