EDI and Dell Boomi – Part 1

Dell Boomi is a cloud-based integration platform with many capabilities, EDI being no exception.
EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange, which is a method to communicate data across various platforms and technologies. It provides a very versatile way to send data such as order and healthcare information very quickly in a standardized way. This standardization comes from the many EDI file types which exist. These file types are denoted by their respective numbers. For example, an 810 file is used to represent an Invoice.
EDI Files can be intimidating at first glance, but once you understand some basic syntax they become logical to read. For example, here’s a very small 810 Invoice file below:

ST*810*1004~
BIG*20101204*217224*20101204*P792940~
REF*DP*099~
REF*IA*99999~
N1*ST**92*123~
ITD*01*3***0**60~
IT1*1*4*EA*8.60**UP*999999330023~
IT1*2*2*EA*15.00**UP*999999330115~
IT1*3*2*EA*7.30**UP*999999330146~
IT1*4*4*EA*17.20**UP*999999330184~
IT1*5*8*EA*4.30**UP*999999330320~
IT1*6*4*EA*4.30**UP*999999330337~
IT1*7*6*EA*1.50**UP*999999330634~
IT1*8*6*EA*1.50**UP*999999330641~
TDS*21740~ CAD*****GTCT**BM*99999~
CTT*8~
SE*18*1004~
GE*1*1320~

Each line in the file is called a “Segment”. Within each segment there are numerous “Elements”, each element is separated by an “Element Delimiter”. In the case of our sample file this is an asterisk, or “*”. The first element of each segment is called our “Segment Identifier” and is part of the driving force for how Dell Boomi can parse an EDI file. This defines what segment we’re looking at, and in Boomi we can define where we can expect various identifiers in the file, how many times they can appear, how many elements they should have, which of those elements are required, and more. The last bit is the “Segment Terminator” this tells whatever parser is being used when a particular segment is over and it should start looking for the next one. In our sample file’s case this is defined by a tilde, “~”, and a newline.
In Boomi we can create EDI Profiles, which essentially act as a parser for EDI files. They allow you to define the segments and various settings for those segments so that your file can be certain to meet your business requirements.
What we’ll being doing in this two part blog post is creating a basic 810 EDI Profile in the Dell Boomi AtomSphere, and modify it to match some of our theoretical business requirements that we may have. Then we will create a process to map that data to some sort of internal XML document. Finally we’ll send the file out to a disk.

Creating a Profile

To get started we’ll need to create a new EDI Profile for our document.
Click create component in the top left of your AtomSphere account.

Change the component type to “Profile”, and the profile type to “EDI” and set a name for your profile. Click create.

We now have a blank EDI Profile open, what we see are three basic sections for the profile. These are defined as “loops” we have the Header Loop, Detail Loop, and Summary Loop.

We now have a blank EDI Profile open, what we see are three basic sections for the profile. These are defined as “loops” we have the Header Loop, Detail Loop, and Summary Loop.

In our case we just need to make sure the segment terminator is set to “~” since that’s what our file is using.

Next we could build an entire profile by hand, or we could take advantage of the fact that Dell Boomi has several pre-defined profiles for X12 schemas. We can click the green “Import” button in the top right of our profile screen.

This will bring up a window with a dropdown for Version, here you select your relevant X12 version. In our case “5010”.

This brings up a list of file types, scroll down until you find 810 – Invoice, select it, and press OK.

This brings up another page which lists the various segments that make up our file. You can go through and select them all, or you can just select the relevant ones to the files you are using. Once you’re done selecting, just hit OK.

And we’re done! We now have an EDI Profile that will interact correctly with our 810 Invoice file. With this we can feed in EDI files and manipulate the data using maps, transforming it in many different ways.

 
In Part 2 we will cover how to modify our new profile for a custom segment type our hypothetical business may require. Then we will map our EDI to an XML schema and output.
Stay tuned!

Dell Boomi AtomSphere
The Dell Boomi AtomSphere integration platform is a shared-everything, multi-tenant platform that supports cloud-to-cloud, SaaS-to-SaaS, cloud-to-on-premises, on-premises-to-on-premises and B2B integration. Boomi AtomSphere supports real-time integration and elastically scales to meet high-volume needs in mobile, batch (ETL) and EDI environments. Easily accessed via a browser, it delivers an impressive range of integration, master data management (MDM) and platform extension capabilities.