Chapter 5. Advanced EDI

Table of Contents

1. Parts of an EDI Profile
1.1. The EDI Profile Itself
1.2. EDI Forms
1.2.1. Basic EDI Tokens
1.2.2. Defining New EDI Tokens
1.3. Sending EDI in Batches
2. Using FTP to Send EDI
3. Sending CSV Files
4. Sending HTML Files
5. Sending XML Files
6. How to Create Reusable EDI Profiles
6.1. Start Slowly
6.2. Start Generally
6.3. Grow Slowly
6.4. An Example
6.4.1. Building a General EDI Profile
6.4.2. Entering the Required Customer Data
6.4.3. Testing
7. System EDI Profiles
7.1. EDI for Quotes
7.2. Incident EDI
7.3. Ad Hoc Database Queries
7.3.1. Submitting MetaSQL Statements to the xTuple Connect Batch Manager
7.3.2. Query Sets in xTuple Connect
8. Importing Data with xTuple Connect
8.1. Copying Files from an FTP Server
8.2. Import Files from a Local Directory

The previous chapter showed how to set up xTuple Connect to send Invoices to a particular Customer. However, xTuple Connect is capable of much more. Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, is a general term that means different things to different people. xTuple Connect has the following EDI capabilities:

Table 5.1. xTuple Connect EDI Summary

File FormatSend by FTPSend by EmailReceive and Import by FTPReceive and Import by Email
Comma Separated Values (CSV) with header lineXXXX (requires manual intervention)
Tab Separated Values (TSV) with header lineXX  
Any single character with header lineXX  
Comma Separated Values (CSV) without header lineXXXX (requires manual intervention)
Tab Separated Values (TSV) without header lineXX  
Any single character delimiter without header lineXX  
XMLXXXX (requires manual intervention)
HTML with header lineXXX (treat as XML)X (requires manual intervention)
HTML without header lineXX  
PDFXX  

In this chapter we will explore the following aspects of EDI configuration:

Caution

Much of the information in this chapter is technical in nature. If you have trouble following the steps described here, please contact your system administrator for assistance.