EDIFACT, CSV & XML

What is EDIFACT?

EDIFACT is an international standard form of communication for the trade of goods globally.

The EDIFACT standard provides a set of syntax rules to structure, an interactive exchange protocol and provides a set of standard messages which allow multi-country and multi-industry exchange of electronic business documents. EDIFACT is widely used across Europe, mainly due to the fact that many companies adopted it very early on.

The EDIFACT grammar consists of message descriptions, that is, messages that contain instructions on how to present the information of a particular transaction document when they are electronically transmitted into a message, also referred to as the file or portion of a file that contains details of the transaction message to the description of the illustrated form. Thus, one file to be transferred may contain multiple messages or may have only one message, the message can therefore be an order, an invoice, or, for example, a shipping bill.

EDIFACT Integration

• Sending POR’s from customer to supplier using EDI standards.
• Transaction data can be imported and exported out of Advanced Exchequer automatically.
• Exported data can be converted into an EDIFACT compliant document based on the customers’ requirement.
• Imported EDIFACT documents can have additional logic applied to them, to the customer’s needs.

XML

XML is a method of presenting data in a generic, easy to read format. There are several ways that XML is used and most of these are either presented as a file, like the CSV format, or a body of text on a website endpoint, like JSON.

XML can present simple, table like data, or more complex multi-table data and as such was one of the earlier methods used for API endpoints so that software based systems could collect data in a format that could be read and integrated into any data language.

We can import data into Advanced Exchequer from XML files, by mapping the data into SQL tables, we can also reverse this process in order to present Advanced Exchequer data as XML in order for 3rd party systems to read this data into their system.

CSV

Integration is about moving data from one place to another, typically each side hold the data in different ways and there are various tools that are used in order to present the data in a generic format in order to move it between systems.

CSV is an old, well-known format that has been used for this purpose for many years. This format is simply a table of data in a single file with columns and rows, we take this data and map the fields into a simple database table and then we match the fields to those that Advanced Exchequer require in order to import the data.

Alternatively, we can take data from Advanced Exchequer and map this into a CSV formatted file in order to send the data to a third party system.