Re: Rather aggravating EDI/FTP question

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Basically, we are sending our data in 80 character fixed length.  They
> claim that in prior testing we were sending one record per EDI segment.
> We've done some checking and think that it would have been impossible for
> us to change the record format and we even suspect that their early
> testing may have been done off of data we were emailing and not the FTP
> files as claimed.  As you can tell we may not have the best relationship
> with this vendor.

My EDI translator software (Premenos/Harbinger/Peregrine/Inovis) has
options for "wrapped" and "unwrapped" which I can configure.  I can also
set a record length of 80 or 132...

I don't know about your situation, but in mine, accidentally switching
from unwrapped to wrapped would just be a matter of changing a "U" to a
"W", so it wouldn't be hard at all.


> They claim that the fixed length record isn't 'EDI standard' and our
> vendor says it is.......to protect the innocent I'm leaving names out.  I
> can change how we send the data but with this vendor I want to make sure I
> know what is what.

AFIAK, FTP is not an EDI standard.  The original EDI standard used XModem
over async modems.   The internet standards for EDI use SMTP (if AS1) or
HTTP (if AS2).   Since FTP is not a standard, it's not possible to say
how the records in an FTP transmission must be formatted...   I guess you
just have to come to an agreement with your trading partners.

> Is it normal for people to send their data in fixed length records or is
> it one record per segment?  And is the term EDI standard really mean it
> one or the other is a defacto standard?

I could go on a long rant about how pointless EDI standards are.  The
"standard" provides for so many different "optionals" that it really
defeats the purpose of having a standard.   What good is a standard if it
provides 20,000 different ways to do the same thing?   The result:  I have
to write separate code to accomodate every customer I do EDI with.

But back to your question about "one seg per record" vs "segments crammed
together and wrapped."  It shouldn't matter.  Segments are delimited by
segment delimiters not records!  When you read in a segment, you should be
reading until you get the delimiter (around here, that's usually a tilde
character) without regard to whether you have to span records to do so.

Now, if your segment delimiter is the CR or LF character, then you need
to be careful that when you convert your PF to a stream file for transfer
that you don't insert CRLF characters in the middle of the segments.  But,
if that's not a delimiter, then it really shouldn't matter.