TRADACOMS Support in B2B
- by Dheeraj Kumar
TRADACOMS is an initial standard for EDI. Predominantly used in the retail sector of United Kingdom. This is similar to EDIFACT messaging system, involving ecs file for translation and validation of messages.
The slight difference between EDIFACT and TRADACOMS is,
1. TRADACOMS is a simpler version than EDIFACT
2. There is no Functional Acknowledgment in TRADACOMS
3. Since it is just a business message to be sent to the trading partner, the various reference numbers at STX, BAT, MHD level need not be persisted in B2B as there is no Business logic gets derived out of this.
Considering this, in AS11 B2B, this can be handled out of the box using Positional Flat file document plugin.
Since STX, BAT segments which define the envelope details , and part of transaction, has to be sent from the back end application itself as there is no Document protocol parameters defined in B2B.
These would include some of the identifiers like SenderCode, SenderName, RecipientCode, RecipientName, reference numbers.
Additionally the batching in this case be achieved by sending all the messages of a batch in a single xml from backend application, containing total number of messages in Batch as part of EOB (Batch trailer )segment.
In the case of inbound scenario, we can identify the document based on start position and end position of the incoming document. However, there is a plan to identify the incoming document based on Tradacom standard instead of start/end position.
Please email to [email protected] if you need a working sample.
