Re: java lib for writing and reading EDI/EANCOM files?

Frank Langelage wrote:
Roedy Green wrote:
On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:40:53 +0100, Frank Langelage <frank@xxxxxxx>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

Does anyone of you know a free available library for creating and reading EDI files, maybe with some validation routines?

did a Google Search on EDI and found this page of tools to convert to
XML

http://www.stylusstudio.com/edi/

Yes I saw that too, but it's commercial and seems to cover transformations from XML to EDI or back only, but not creating validated EDI files directly from a Java App.

My first job involving Java was to write libraries to handle ANSI EDI transactions involving health-insurance claims. The EDI standards are hopelessly complex and poorly organized, or were then. The largest part of the effort was simply analyzing what constituted a valid EDI message. Translation to and from XML, and to and from various JDBC stores, was very straightforward after that. Just to support about 6 EDI formats involved roughly two-and-a-half man years, of which maybe three quarters was analysis and documentation of the structures in a programmer-friendly format (also XML). Before that I was involved in other EDI formats using C. The effort there was huge also.

There weren't any EDI validation tools available to us back then (this was back in the 20th century).

Each EDI format is sufficiently different from any other that they require independent analysis.

The point is that there is a huge amount of effort to create EDI libraries that actually work. EDI is a very commercial format, not used by the general public. You will likely find that all good EDI libs require license fees.

Maybe in the 21st century EDI formats are easier to analyze, making it perhaps feasible to write your own EDI library.

As for using XML as an intermediate format for EDI, that's one of the things we did in our health-insurance-claim project. The tools to go XML to Java and back are free and standard. XML could be a very viable solution for your project.

--
Lew
.

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