4.3.4.2. Edifact – Babelway

Introduction

United Nations / Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (UN/EDIFACT) is the international EDI standard developed under the United Nations impulse. This standard is maintained and further developed by a UN body. EDIFACT has now been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the ISO standard ISO 9735.

The EDIFACT standard provides a set of syntax rules to structure data, an interactive exchange protocol (I-EDI), and standard messages which allow multi-country and multi-industry exchange.

You can find more information about Edifact on its offical site ( http://www.unece.org/cefact/edifact/welcome.html ) or on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIFACT ).

Below is a sample EDIFACT file.

UNB+UNOA:1+005435656:1+006415160:1+060515:1434+00000000000778'
UNH+00000000000117+INVOIC:D:97B:UN'
BGM+380+342459+9'
DTM+3:20060515:102'
RFF+ON:521052'
NAD+BY+792820524::16++CUMMINS MID-RANGE ENGINE PLANT'
NAD+SE+005435656::16++GENERAL WIDGET COMPANY'
CUX+1:USD'
LIN+1++157870:IN'
IMD+F++:::WIDGET'
QTY+47:1020:EA'
ALI+US'
MOA+203:1202.58'
PRI+INV:1.179'
LIN+2++157871:IN'
IMD+F++:::DIFFERENT WIDGET'
QTY+47:20:EA'
ALI+JP'
MOA+203:410'
PRI+INV:20.5'
UNS+S'
MOA+39:2137.58'
ALC+C+ABG'
MOA+8:525'
UNT+24+00000000000117'
UNZ+1+00000000000778'

Extensive support

Babelway supports all Edifact messages, and knows all the definitions of the different norms. This knowledge of these definitions will allow additional functionalities when you work with Edifact. Amongst other things :

By just loading a sample Edifact file, Babelway will be able to deduce the structure, find the definition of the elements, calculate human-readable labels, ... You can see on the following screenshot the result when you load the sample above.

Edifact tree just after having loaded a Sample.
Adding or removing segment elements is very easy, as the interface knows precisely which elements may take place in the selected segment.

Edit segment shows all the possible elements.
In the same way, segments can be easily added. The interface will offer you segments and elements that may take place at this location.

Edit segment shows all the possible elements.
Messages can be validated deeply (structure, mandatory fields, values, ...) automatically, without having to define any validation manually.
For all the runtime messages, comments are added in the internal representation to ease the reading of the file.

Internal representation of an Edifact.

Note: For some specific segment if the position is changed in the "Message In" tree and/or if the position of the segment is changed in the input message this will leads to a different naming in the "Message IN after transformation to XML" file for this segment and then in this case the mapping will not generate the values in the output message.

Properties

Specific properties are :

Validate structure	Only for messages OUT. If yes, an error will be generated if your message has an incorrect structure. Deactivate only if you really want to send messages with incorrect structures.
Validate values	If yes, all values will be checked against their definition. Deactivate only if you really want to receive/send messages with values that do not respect the Edifact standard.
Validate segments	If yes, all segments will be checked against their definition (mandatory fields must exist, no field can be present if not in definition). Deactivate only if you really want to receive/send messages with values that do not respect the Edifact standard.
Sign Edifact	If checked, you will be able to configure the settings for a signed edifact. When the user attempts to upload a signed Edifact file, the certificate is automatically added to the environment’s trusted certificates and the corresponding certificate will be automatically chosen in the message definition’s properties. When processing a signed Edifact in the messaging engine, the code checks if the certificate found in the Edifact file is one of the chosen certificates in the message definition’s property.
Security Version	If set, signature will be applied to the edifact generated file and security segments will be inserted (USH, UST, USR, USA, USC, UNO and UNP).
Security certificate	Which certificate will be used for security segments.
UNA segment	Only for messages OUT. The UNA segment to be used in your output message. If you asked for an empty UNA segment, it will not be printed, and default separators will be used. If you specify one, the rest of the file will be written accordingly, adapting to the separators defined in the segment.
Add line breaks between segments	Only for messages OUT. If yes, an additional line break will be added in the output message between every segment. Only for human readability.