EDI X.400/MIME conversions

[Ruth Moulton]

Ned,

> I've looked into this a bit, and the issue seems to be one of whether or not
> the X.435 wrapper around the raw EDIFACT object is important to you. If its
> unimportant it should be removed and the existing standard for EDI-in-MIME

you do mean RFC 1767 here ? - if not what else is there ?

> should be used. If it is important then it needs to be preserved, which could
> easily be done by defining another MIME type. I for one would also be very
> interested in specific details of what in the X.435 wrapper needs to be
> preserved in a given application of EDI. I'm not saying there isn't anything --
> there almost certainly is -- but I would like some real-world examples.
>

Not sure how much of the X.435 ASN.1 you refer to as the 'wrapper'.
An EDI message consists of a Heading and a Body, the Body contains the
Edifact object in the primary body, but may contain other useful information
e.g. related objects.

More importantly some of the fields in the X.435 Heading relate directly
to fields in the other EDI formats, for example X.435 Service String
Advice is the EDIFACT UNA Service String Advice, X.435 recipients contains
an Identification Code which is mandatory in the EDIFACT UNB Sender
Identification. Looking at the two standards this last item appears to be
mandatory in EDIFACT and Optional in X.435....

I don't know details about X12, except X.435 has a table of fields that
relate directly to X12 and EDIFACT fields.

I too would like to have a real world example, and have asked for more
details from the people who made the original request prompting my work
(they are a couple of removes from me!)

> Ned
>
Ruth
--
Ruth Moulton ru...@muswell.demon.co.uk
Consultant,
65 Tetherdown, London N10 1NH, UK. Tel: +44 181 883 5823

[Ned Freed]

> The question I have for these mail lists is if anyone knows of any work
> being done (or already done) in this area, i.e. specifying conversion
> between X.435 other EDI formats, or X.435 and MIME ?

I've looked into this a bit, and the issue seems to be one of whether or not
the X.435 wrapper around the raw EDIFACT object is important to you. If its
unimportant it should be removed and the existing standard for EDI-in-MIME

should be used. If it is important then it needs to be preserved, which could
easily be done by defining another MIME type. I for one would also be very
interested in specific details of what in the X.435 wrapper needs to be
preserved in a given application of EDI. I'm not saying there isn't anything --
there almost certainly is -- but I would like some real-world examples.

Ned