Append invoice list EDI message on outgoing batch

2
votes

One of our partners requires that a "summary" edi message is appended to any EDI invoice interchange (apparently known as "invoice list"). This message contains a reference that every individual invoice should have in an RFF segment, as well as the cummulated MOA values.

My question is: does BizTalk Server (in particular BizTalk 2009) provide a convenient way to append another EDI message to the outgoing EDI batch upon release? I cannot find anything on MSDN.

My current idea is to append it in the send pipeline of the port that will transmit the batch, but I really would like a more convenient way.

2
biztalkedibiztalk-2009edifact

2 Answers

4
votes

I'll put it this way, your Trading Partner has a rather unusual, perhaps unique, requirement that is itself inconvenient. So, sorry, there is no 'convenient' way to accomplish this in BizTalk, probably in any platform either.

Anyway, here's what I would do, or at least some things I would try.

  • Batch the Invoices normally, such as with the Batching Service.
  • Subscribe to the Batch with an Orchestration.
  • Map the Batch to the Summary, which ever transaction that is, but it has to be X12/EDIFACT.
  • Use a dual input Map to create the batch with the summary appended.
  • Send to Send Port with the EDI Assembler.

I'm thinking it would be easier to use a Custom Xslt for the appending Map. That would save you from having to create a Schema for the Batch message, which doesn't actually ship with BizTalk.

The Xslt itself would be pretty simple since you just copying the two Messages. FYI, the Batch Message Orchestration Type wold be Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.Any. You can't use XmlDocument as a Map source.

1
votes

I had the same requirement once, but instead of one specific summary message, I needed to be able to have full control over the the order of the EDI messages in the batch.

This is how I solved this at the time: http://blog.codit.eu/post/2009/11/10/Outbound-EDI-batching-in-BizTalk-Server-2009.aspx

It does have some downsides, but it might be handy to know.