The Inovis Blog

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Those of you who have seen my previous posts know that I haven’t given up on EDI.  As near as I can tell, the debate of EDI vs. XML continues to rage around the world.  It’s interesting to notice that the arguments haven’t really changed.  EDI’s harder to read (by humans), XML takes a lot more bytes to say the same thing.  I won’t rehash all the points.  Suffice to say, EDI has good points and bad points…and XML has good points and bad points.  Kind of like the old “Tastes Great—Less Filling” argument.  The cold hard fact is this: They’re both here for the long run; neither is going away in the foreseeable future.

We recognize this and so we’ve enhanced TrustedLink for System i (TLi) to put EDI and XML on a more even footing.  Typically, EDI is specified by a limited number of standards organizations such as X12, EDIFACT, etc.  On the other hand, though there are some XML standards organizations (CXML, xCBL, UBL, CIDX, PIDX, HRXML, X12 (CICA) spring to mind for starters) we’ve seen that there are nearly as many industry groups, organizations and, yes, even individuals as there are XML message specifications.  Further, while EDI standards are easy to distribute and store in tabular format, XML specifications are usually distributed in nice suitable-for-parsing packages known as Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and XML Schemas.

Prior to TLi version 6.3.0, there were two ways to create maps for XML documents.  A user could hand-build the structure of the XML data in the Visual Mapper or, they could import a DTD.  Neither of these approaches is optimal.

• Manual entry of XML’s hierarchical structure often leads to complex document structures that are time consuming and error prone.
• The DTD importer, while much more useful, was limited by the nature of DTDs themselves.  A DTD provides basic structure, but has little control on data types and repetition counts.

As XML has gradually matured, XML designers, definers and users have turned toward the XML Schema as the preferred method of exchanging specifications.  The advantage to XML Schemas are two-fold:

1. They are written in XML using a very specific vocabulary.
2. They provide more specificity for things like data types, data sizes, and repetitions.

We realized that to stay relevant, TLi would need to be able to work with Schemas as well as DTDs.

Enter TLi version 6.3.0.  In this release, we substantially upgraded our support for XML by improving our XML importer capabilities.  For example:

• The new, improved XML importer can import Schemas and DTDs (standalone and multi-file, local and remote).
• It provides the ability to trim the XML structures.  We see many all-encompassing Schemas published.  These Schemas typically have all the common data structures, plus the roots for a variety of different documents.  In order to make usable, readable maps, it is very helpful to omit irrelevant structures.
• The Importer now provides a GUI for identifying the appropriate root node and for pruning the data structure tree prior to loading it into the Visual Mapper.
• The Importer and the Visual Mapper also support the use of namespace prefixes which is particularly useful for UBL specifications.

The result is greater flexibility and versatility that will keep you going in the modern eCommerce era no matter what your trading partners expect of you.