Interesting question. I usually work in situations where the
application format is handed to me. Your guiding principles should be
the data that can be used by your business application on inbound and
the data that can be produced from your application on outbound. For
example, if a trading partner is sending you a reference number in EDI
that the business application has no use for, don't put it in the
application file.
Beyond that there are tradeoffs in every choice you make.
In regard to positional vs delimited, you will have fewer problems with
string handling if you go with positional. (e.g., how are you going to
handle it when someone sends you quote characters in the data and you
use them for string delimiters in your CSV file?).
In regard to qualifiers, if you decide to use a generic value with a
qualifier, your application import will have to read the qualifier to
determine what to do with the data. OTOH, if you decide to use a
specific reference number (e.g. blanket PO number) your EDI system will
have to read the qualifiers to determine where to place the data.
Generally, I like to make application fields specific and leave the
logic in the translator since qualifier values can vary between trading
partners and they're sometimes cryptic and non-intuitive to non-EDI
programmers.
Your import and export logic will generally be simpler if each
application record corresponds to a database row. However, this may or
may not be nice for your EDI maps. Generally, I try to go for as few
record types in the application file as possible.
Good luck,
Mike
Becker, Adam wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> I'm hoping to get your input on application files, does any body know of
> any best practices for defining the format for these? Is delimited or
> positional better? Should you use qualifiers for things like references
> or just have a field for every type of reference you could possibly
> expect? Should you only have one line in the file for each line in the
> database? Any input/advice/past mistakes/etc. would be very much
> appreciated.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Adam
>
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