EDIFACT, an international standard for EDI trading in commercial and non-commercial sectors, has an underlying syntax that is an ISO standard.
Within that syntax, there are directories of data elements,
composite data elements, segments, and messages. There are conventions
for placing messages in an "envelope" which identifies the sender
and receiver and other attributes of a transmission. For more information
about the EDIFACT messaging standard, see the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and
Electronic Business Web site and click "Standards" on
the left side.
EDIFACT messages can be modeled using DFDL or MRM Tagged/Delimited String Format (TDS).
The high-level structure of an EDIFACT message is as follows:
Selected DFDL schemas for EDIFACT are available on the GitHub DFDLSchemas web site web site. DFDL schemas
for other UN/EDIFACT releases and message types are available
from IBM®. For information about
DFDL, see Data Format Description Language (DFDL).
The following information in this topic is specific to MRM.
You can model the top-level interchange of an EDIFACT message by setting the following properties for the complex type on which the message is based:
Composition = Sequence
Content Validation = Closed
Tag Data Separator = <EDIFACT_TAGDATA_SEP>
Data Element Separation = Tagged Delimited
Delimiter = <EDIFACT_CS>
Within an EDIFACT message, you can define the delimiters to be used in the message itself using the optional Service String Advice element. To enable this element to be recognized as an EDIFACT Service String, you must set the element property Interpret Element Value to EDIFACT Service String. You must also set the delimiter values to the mnemonic values that are defaulted when you set the Message Standard property to EDIFACT.