Hi Chris, thank you for the reply. I'll start studying J's cut. It looks
like it'll require some hard studying from what I see in the dictionary
entry for cut (pasted below).
Regards,
George
*Cut *m;.n u;.n _ 1/2 _
x u;.0 y applies u to a rectangle or cuboid of y with one vertex at the
point in y indexed by v=:0{x , and with the opposite vertex determined as
follows: the dimension is |1{x , but the rectangle extends *back* from v along
any axis j for which the index j{v is negative. Finally, the order of the
selected items is reversed along each axis k for which k{1{x is negative. If
xis a vector, it is treated as the matrix 0,:x .
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
chris burke cburke at jsoftware.com
<programming%40forums.jsoftware.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BJprogramming%5D%20Parsing%20EDI%20data%20and%20converting%20them%20into%20a%0A%20database%20format&In-Reply-To=%3CCAAK_udWVCzatMug3QR7JqkaN03BCJ3Hy6d-Xuh1hGx2ukEFisA%40mail.gmail.com%3E>
*Fri Nov 13 18:53:56 UTC 2015*
I did this some years ago and found that J can parse any given EDI format
very efficiently, using cut to chop up the strings. You might need
different functions for specific EDI formats, rather than a single function
to parse arbitrary EDI.
On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:36 PM, George Dallas <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi Joe, thank you for your reply. I am indeed thinking about a subset of X12
> messages and specifically 20 types of utility exchanges with power suppliers,
> found on the link here:
> https://www.ameren.com/business-partners/cpwg/illinois-edi-implementation-guide.
>
> The x12parser you mentioned is a good and extensive project and with a little
> work it might provide for what I need, but it's the verbosity of C# used
> there that drives me towards thinking of a cleaner version that possibly
> could be implemented in J.
>
> I'm wondering if given any specification, say the 997 you mentioned below,
> the essence of the problem of converting an edi message to a flat file in
> normalized form can be expressed concisely in J. If that were the case, I
> suspect it would scale better and be a much faster implementation.
>
> If I were to go down this route are there any J facilities you'd recommend
> for parsing and transforming text files?
>
> Thank you,
>
> George
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 11:10 AM, George Dallas <george.dallas at gmail.com
> <http://jsoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/programming>> wrote:
> >* Hello,
> *>>* Has anyone had the chance to work with EDI data using J?
> *
> Hi George, I have not, but I spent a few minutes looking into it.
>
> >>* Of course there is a huge industry out there spun to deal with this
> *>* problem, but I was wondering if anyone have had to tackle the issue using
> J
> *>* and if you think it's a doable project for J.
> *>
> I think we would need a bit more information about what you see for
> the project. Are you interested in building a library in J capable of
> parsing and interpreting all the various types of X12 messages or do
> you just need to work with a subset?
>
> If you were working with a small subset then I would consider
> implementing just what is necessary to parse those messages. If it's
> many messages, then I would lean towards integrating with something
> that has already solved the problem. The spec sounds reasonably
> complex and to make use of the information, the definitions are
> required.
>
> Here's one possible implementation to work with:
> https://x12parser.codeplex.com/
>
> Here's the 997 specification out of the nearly 1000 options
> https://x12parser.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#trunk/src/OopFactory.X12/Specifications/Ansi-997-4010Specification.xml
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 10:10 AM, George Dallas <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Has anyone had the chance to work with EDI data using J?
>>
>> EDI messages are text files formatted for facilitating business to
>> business communications. If one has a sufficient large history of these
>> files and manage to insert them into a database, then querying the database
>> would give answers to many business questions regarding customers, costs
>> etc.
>>
>> The link and text pasted below I found it to be a concise description of
>> the problem.
>>
>> Of course there is a huge industry out there spun to deal with this
>> problem, but I was wondering if anyone have had to tackle the issue using J
>> and if you think it's a doable project for J.
>>
>> Regards,
>> George
>>
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/pstuteville/x12
>>
>> == The problem
>>
>> X12 is a set of "standards" possessing all the elegance of an elephant
>> designed by committee, and quite literally so, see http://www.x12.org.
>> X12 defines rough syntax for specifying text messages, but each of
>> more than 300 specifications defines its own message structure. While
>> messages themselves are easy to parse with a simple tokenizer, their
>> semantics is heavily dependent on the domain. For example, this is
>> X12/997 message conveying "Functional Acknowledgment":
>>
>> ST*997*2878~AK1*HS*293328532~AK2*270*307272179~AK3*NM1*8*L1010_0*8~
>> AK4*0:0*66*1~AK4*0:1*66*1~AK4*0:2*66*1~AK3*NM1*8*L1010_1*8~AK4*1:0*
>> 66*1~AK4*1:1*66*1~AK3*NM1*8*L1010_2*8~AK4*2:0*66*1~AK5*R*5~AK9*R*1*
>> 1*0~SE*8*2878~
>>
>> I.e., X12 defines an alphabet and somewhat of a dictionary - not a
>> grammar or semantics for each particular data interchange
>> conversation. Because of many entrenched implementations and
>> government mandates, the X12 is not going to die anytime soon,
>> unfortunately.
>>
>> The message above can be easily represented in Ruby as a nested array:
>>
>> m = [
>> ['ST', '997', '2878'],
>> ['AK1', 'HS', '293328532'],
>> ['AK2', '270', '307272179'],
>> ['AK3', 'NM1', '8', 'L1010_0', '8'],
>> ['AK4', '0:0', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK4', '0:1', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK4', '0:2', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK3', 'NM1', '8', 'L1010_1', '8'],
>> ['AK4', '1:0', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK4', '1:1', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK3', 'NM1', '8', 'L1010_2', '8'],
>> ['AK4', '2:0', '66', '1'],
>> ['AK5', 'R', '5'],
>> ['AK9', 'R', '1', '1', '0'],
>> ['SE', '8', '2878'],
>> ]
>>
>> but it will not help any since, say, segment 'AK4' is ambiguously
>> defined and its meaning not at all obvious until the message's
>> structure is interpreted and correct 'AK4' segment is found.
>>
>> == The solution
>>
>> === Message structure
>>
>> Each participant in EDI has to know the structure of the data coming
>> across the wire - X12 or no X12. The X12 structures are defined in
>> so-called Implementation Guides - thick books with all the data pieces
>> spelled out. There is no other choice, but to invent a
>> computer-readable definition language that will codify these
>> books. For familiarity sake we'll use XML. For example, the X12/997
>> message can be defined as
>>
>> <Definition>
>> <Loop name="997">
>> <Segment name="ST" min="1" max="1"/>
>> <Segment name="AK1" min="1" max="1"/>
>> <Loop name="L1000" max="999999" required="y">
>> <Segment name="AK2" max="1" required="n"/>
>> <Loop name="L1010" max="999999" required="n">
>> <Segment name="AK3" max="1" required="n"/>
>> <Segment name="AK4" max="99" required="n"/>
>> </Loop>
>> <Segment name="AK5" max="1" required="y"/>
>> </Loop>
>> <Segment name="AK9" max="1" required="y"/>
>> <Segment name="SE" max="1" required="y"/>
>> </Loop>
>> </Definition>
>>
>> Namely, the 997 is a 'loop' containing segments ST (only one), AK1
>> (also only one), another loop L1000 (zero or many repeats), segments
>> AK9 and SE. The loop L1000 can contain a segment AK2 (optional) and
>> another loop L1010 (zero or many), and so on.
>>
>> The segments' structure can be further defined as, for example,
>>
>> <Segment name="AK2">
>> <Field name="TransactionSetIdentifierCode" required="y" min="3" max="3"
>> validation="T143"/>
>> <Field name="TransactionSetControlNumber" required="y" min="4" max="9"/>
>> </Segment>
>>
>> which defines a segment AK2 as having two fields:
>> TransactionSetIdentifierCode and TransactionSetControlNumber. The
>> field TransactionSetIdentifierCode is defined as having a type of
>> string (default), being required, having length of minimum 3 and
>> maximum 3 characters, and being validated against a table T143. The
>> validation table is defined as
>>
>> <Table name="T143">
>> <Entry name="100" value="Insurance Plan Description"/>
>> <Entry name="101" value="Name and Address Lists"/>
>> ...
>> <Entry name="997" value="Functional Acknowledgment"/>
>> <Entry name="998" value="Set Cancellation"/>
>> </Table>
>>
>> with entries having just names and values.
>>
>> This message is fully flashed out in an example 'misc/997.xml' file,
>> copied from the ASC X12N 276/277 (004010X093) "Health Care
>> Claim Status Request and Response" National Electronic Data
>> Interchange Transaction Set Implementation Guide.
>>
>> Now expressions like
>>
>> message.L1000.L1010[1].AK4.DataElementReferenceNumber
>>
>> start making sense of sorts, overall X12's idiocy notwithstanding - it's
>> a field called 'DataElementReferenceNumber' of a first of possibly
>> many segments 'AK4' found in the second repeat of the loop 'L1010'
>> inside the enclosing loop 'L1000'. The meaning of the value '66' found
>> in this field is still in the eye of the beholder, but, at least its
>> location is clearly identified in the message.
>>
>>
>>
>
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