5 ms·

When I worked for a huge electronics distributor in the EU I got assigned the EDI hot potato by accident and kinda grew to like it. I got to talk to other compa

by mszcz 5y ago

When I worked for a huge electronics distributor in the EU I got assigned the EDI hot potato by accident and kinda grew to like it. I got to talk to other companies's IT people that handled it on the their side instead of business facing sales or management people. Started with loving the XML formats and hating EDIFACT but that got reversed real fast. One of the projects I'm still most proud of from that time is consolidating all of our EDI systems into one, coherent (and beautifly designed I might add since no one interfered because no one cared ;) whole that used EDIFACT as an internal format to represent documents. That enabled developing integrations quickly by just writing a translator/parser between our format and whatever God awful format the other party used. One thing I do hate with a passion still is the AS2 transmission later that some vendors used. My god, what a shitshow that is. No stable clients, discrepancies between implementations and all for what? Essentially transferring files. Ugh.

beastcoast 5y ago
AS2 is interesting because it includes a cryptographically signed Message Disposition Notification (MDN) - whenever there's a question if a document was delivered, just give the MDN information to the partner. This has led to some interesting troubleshooting sessions, where it turns out that the message failed somewhere in the partner's system, and the only way for them to dig it out and identify the issue was to check logs for the MDN message ID. I've also heard that MDNs hold up in a court of law; no idea if that's been tested. But it's a great way to confirm delivery of the payload without having to worry about parsing errors.
lawkwok 5y ago
This was my favourite part working for an e-commerce store that had an archaic inventory/order management system. While not EDI, I wrestled with a multitude of large CSVs that needed to be parsed in order to have a complete picture of the inventory and orders. I would love finding the system was able to export a slightly more helpful CSV somewhere in a hidden menu that would enable me to gradually remove my spaghetti code or reduce the number of CSV imports.

by mszcz 5y ago

beastcoast 5y ago

AS2 is interesting because it includes a cryptographically signed Message Disposition Notification (MDN) - whenever there's a question if a document was delivered, just give the MDN information to the partner. This has led to some interesting troubleshooting sessions, where it turns out that the message failed somewhere in the partner's system, and the only way for them to dig it out and identify the issue was to check logs for the MDN message ID. I've also heard that MDNs hold up in a court of law; no idea if that's been tested. But it's a great way to confirm delivery of the payload without having to worry about parsing errors.

lawkwok 5y ago

This was my favourite part working for an e-commerce store that had an archaic inventory/order management system. While not EDI, I wrestled with a multitude of large CSVs that needed to be parsed in order to have a complete picture of the inventory and orders. I would love finding the system was able to export a slightly more helpful CSV somewhere in a hidden menu that would enable me to gradually remove my spaghetti code or reduce the number of CSV imports.