Like an earlier poster my experience with Web Methods
(WM's) has fallen far short of satisfactory. I find
this double translation 850 to UDM and UDM to IDOC to
be unnecessary and fraught with complications. In our
case the WM's folks are a different group than the SAP
or
EDI folks. So there is a lot of added confusion to
the process. And Web Methods performance/uptime has
been atrocious even on the scale of GIS.
Back to your question though, say a PO comes in from
Krogers. Assuming they are sending different ISA/GS
IDs (one for your company one for the acquisition
company) you could use the ID's that come in through
Process Data (which is the meta-data for that file)
and use a Choice Start/End node in your BP to route
data to the correct destination. Map it how you want,
idoc, XML, etc. If the ISA/GS ID isn't different, you
could add an UPDATE Process Data rule in your map to
update Process Data with the N1-04 or some other field
that differentiates the two. When the Acquisition is
complete you remove or disable the choice start.
On your example about changing versions of Walmart
docs, the savvy mapper knows to deal with the
individual
segments that may have changed and not
rewrite the whole map. By activating/inserting a few
more segments, your map is updated, voila. Just a few
hours, not weeks.
The whole UDM thing seems clever in powerpoint
diagrams but experience with WM's has been negative.
And I'm no GIS cheerleader, they've made a lot of
progress with it, but some parts just seem
fundamentally flawed. Especially if your company just
needs EDI functionality.
On a side note, does anyone else wish for the days of
applications written in C, C++, or even VC++. These
Java based apps like GIS, WM's, Cyclone, are dogs by
comparison. Slow and unreliable. Maybe not fair to
blame it on the language, but still can't help but
notice an obvious decline in the quality of
'
enterprise' apps the same time Java became popular.
-Peter
--- Ron Paquin < wrote:
> Third week on the new job and though I would have
> denied the
> possibility, I find myself missing webMethods.
>
> Specifically, in EDI in webMethods, we used an
> approach involving so-
> called canonical documents (also known as Common
> Business Document or
> Universal
Data Model).
>
> For example, and inbound
X12 4010 850 was first
> translated into a
> Purchase Order Canonical, and then that Purchase
> Order Canonical was
> translated into an SAP 31i IDOC.
>
> Why? A number of reasons. From the Purchase Order
> Canonical, we could
> easily translate into any back end system. For
> example, Kroger sent
> us POs for our core business, but also for an
> acquisition that had
> not been integrated into SAP. So the X12 850, for
> either destination,
> was translated into the PO Canonical, and from there
> the core stuff
> was translated into IDOCs, and the other stuff
> translated into XML
> and from there, via an XLST,
into a PDF to be
> emailed to the
> acquisition folks. Now, once the acquisition is
> integrated into SAP,
> our only change will be to use the same path to the
> IDOC that we do
> for the core stuff--literally, a five minute change.
>
> Another example. We initially implemented Wal-Mart
> at 4030, but
> they've recently mandated upgrading in 5010. In any
> X12-to-IDOC
> translation, this would require recreating all of
> their maps in the
> new version--several weeks' work. In wM using this
> approach, however,
> it was simply a matter of changing the schema in the
> existing map
> from 4030 to 5010 and repointing the mappings--a
> single afternoon's
> work.
>
> I'm probably preaching to the choir, if anyone
> reading this is
> familiar with webMethods and their GEAR
> documentation. There's a
> White Paper called "Canonical Strategy" that you're
> probably familiar
> with.
>
> At any rate, what I'm looking for is some blessed
> person who has gone
> from webMethods TO GIS, and who can point me in the
> direction of how
> the heck I replicate this functionality in GIS.
>
> Anyone?
>
> Regards,
>
> Ron Paquin
> Tenneco Inc.
>
>
>
>
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