I’m in the process of writing another mapping for incoming EDI 850 documents, and I’m having a problem.
This particular client sends us two different flavors of the 850 spec. The first one has mapped nicely and appears to be working fine. However, the second one has incoming data that does not match the schema in webMethods.
My incoming document has a path /T850DT/ST/N1/N4/ITD, where N1 and N4 are both arrays.
The T850 schema in webMethods does not show an ITD child for /T850DT/ST/N1/N4. It does have a /T850DT/ST/ITD path.
Since I’m using the webMethods for my input document reference, I can’t map this path when it comes in. What can I do to correct this? Thanks - MOD
Is a separate, customer-specific T850 EDI schema the only fix here? I hate to have to deviate from the webMethods-provided schemas.
The data being sent from the client has been coming in this way for quite a while, so it won’t be possible to negotiate a correction with them. I’ll have to adapt on my own.
Your situation is common. Depending on how your system treats the data, it could make sense to map the inbound “non-standard” version to a standard EDI doc or to map it to an XML-based canonical.
You can copy and then modify the EDI schema and document, but it will be difficult to keep up with all of the changes if you multiply the document versions by number of trading partners.
If this is the case, then if you do not have a standard release process, then I would concentrate some effort to developing this process so if there are changes down the line, they all are affecting the relevant services.
This flavor of 850 has been deprecated in favor of another that does conform to the ANSI standard 850 EDI. The problem is that we still receive 860 documents that use this old flavor, and it doesn’t quite fit.
As these POs are closed out the problem will diminish. But I have to deal with it in the short term.
Thanks for your advice. It hit me during my noon swim that all I had to do was copy the schema wM provides, add that one child record, generate the document type, and then redo my mappings. Hopefully this will be the only detour I’ll have to take. Thanks - MOD