EDI Interface Overview

EDI standard is used by many business organizations to automate business to business transactions. EDI standard enables organizations to exchange information in a standard way while continuing with their proprietary internal data models and ERP systems. It also permits each organization to change their internal data models and underlying database technologies. EDI has not become ubiquitous because the standard is very involved and is expensive to implement. Many organizations adapted a small subset of the standard and still could leverage the benefits of electronic interchange of data. Due to the issues involved in implementing complete standard, most often the actual implemented subset is vendor specific.

In this document, we will be using the term EDI document which means a transaction set in EDI vocabulary. Typically an EDI document ( Transaction Set ) has a Header, Detail and Summary. These will be called Sections for clarity. A single unit of transmission may group several Documents into a Function Group. An ISA header / Trailer groups all function groups. In simpler cases a single document is sent.

Ultriva’s Dataset architecture and EDI architecture have several common features like hierarchical tabular data, definition based behavior, object oriented access to data, definable validation rules and ability to serialize and deserialize structured data.

Following EDIs are supported by Ultriva