Something about EDI functionality in BizTalk Server

EDI:

Electronic Data Interchange

 

ANSI x12(American National Standards Institute x12):

the EDI  standard used primarily in North America. Any EDI standard provides specifications for the layout of common business documents, such as Purchases Orders, Invoices, Advance Ship Notices, Medical Claim Forms, and the like. EDI standards boards meet from time to time to discuss modifications to the standard. A new version of the standard does not render previous versions obsolete however; two parties exchanging X12 documents may use any version of the standard they wish.

 

850 Transaction Set(purchase order):

A transaction set is an electronic model of a paper transaction or form. The Standards for medical transactions are 837 for medical claims, 835 for medical claim payments, 270 eligiibility inquiry and 271 eligibility response, 276 claim status, 277 claims status response, 820 enrollmnet and 834 premium payments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List

 

Functional Acknowledgement (997):

The 997 functional acknowledgement indicates the results of analysis of the syntax of the functional groups and documents in an X12 interchange. When an error occurs in a document receiving a functional acknowledgement, the sender can reformat the document according to the correct syntax, and then resubmit the document

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc982722(v=BTS.10).aspx

 

简单来说，这些标准指定了数据的格式，数据中各片断代表了不同的含义。出于数据交换、整合的需要，BizTalk在这里起到的作用就是将来源数据，根据所一定的条件，做一定的处理，输出为期望的目标数据。这其中涉及到schema、mapping，pipeline，orcheschation等，也包含tracking,tracing和reporting等功能，有待详述。

 

关于指南中的注意问题：首先要在BizTalk Administration中启用EDI runtime才可以添加EDI Application reference

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb226541.aspx

Parties 中Business profile、Agreement有待进一步了解！

 

使用BizTalk的好处在于，不同的组件都是可扩展的，即可以通过配置实现简单的数据整合，也可以根据需要实现比较复杂的逻辑。另外BizTalk提供了一整套监控、跟踪的机制，一方面便于诊断问题，另一方面也保证了企业级别的数据处理的可靠性，而且这套机制应该也是可扩展的。