The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

The 3rd layer of the EDI envelope is the ST segment.  The ST segment contains a Document Identifier, and a control number. The ST and its partner the SE segment define the beginning and ending of the Document.  The SE segment contains a counter of segments within the document, and the corresponding control number to the ST.  Relatively simple compared to the ISA and the GS. (more…)

What is the GS segment?

The GS segment is the second mandatory enveloping segment.  It shares some properties with the ISA segment.  There is a sender and receiver, version Identifier, time stamp and control number.  But one thing that the GS has that the ISA does not is a Functional Identifier.

That’s right, Functional.  This means that within the GS envelope are only EDI messages or documents that have the same function. (more…)

What is in the ISA?

The ISA Segment is the first segment in any EDI document.  Once you understand what it is saying, This long random seeming string will make sense, and be very helpful in helping you relate EDI documents to the real world task that you need to do. (more…)

An EDI file contains a structure known as enveloping.  Everything that is necessary for the file transmission and parsing, is part of or inside of the envelope.

The first segment in and EDI file is the ISA segment.  The very last segment in and EDI file is the IEA.  For those of you familiar with XML, you may be thinking of this as <File> and </File>.

This approach may make EDI seem familiar, but XML was not around when EDI was being created.  It is more like a Beginning Of File (BOF) and End Of File (EOF) marker.  However, there is no reason in EDI not to place multiple EDI envelopes in the same file. (more…)

For those who may be unfamiliar with the EDI standard, and those who may have used EDI but have encountered a new, unfamiliar question.

This introduction aims at addressing the basic questions of convention and implementation of the EDI technology.  I have a list of topics, and hope that over time I can cover all of them.  I also hope that people reading here may have questions that I haven’t thought to write about.  Please let  me know what your questions are and I will see what I can do about providing answers.

• What is EDI?
• Parts of EDI
• Segments
• Delimiters
• Conventions of EDI
• Why are there more than one version of EDI?
• Usage of EDI specifications
• Standards and Usage
• Encoded Values
• EDI in Good Form
• Element Notation
• Wrapped and Unwrapped EDI
• Enveloping Part One
• Enveloping Part Two – ISA
  
• Enveloping Part Three – GS
• Enveloping Part Four – ST
• Loops in EDI
• Hierarchical Levels

Of course understanding how EDI presents and represents data is the first step.  From here we may want to go to our Data Mapping Guide, or if we are familiar with mapping there are some examples in our mapping case studies of EDI to and from other formats.  Again, if you have an interesting problem or solution, I would love to here about it.  Please send it to
roy@TheIntegrationEngineer.com and i will see what I can do.