ballerinax/edifact.d03a.retail Ballerina library

Overview

UN/EDIFACT D03A Retail group EDI parser: reads and writes the 23 messages covering product data, exchange reconciliation and inquiries, requests for quote and for document, pricing history, returns announcements and instructions, reservations, generic and statistical messages, and insurance policy administration and reinsurance messages.

UN/EDIFACT is the United Nations standard for electronic data interchange, used to exchange business documents such as orders, invoices and despatch advices between trading partners.

Key Features

• Typed records for all 23 messages in the retail group, each in its own submodule, so a program only pulls in the records for the messages it handles.
• Envelope-aware parsing and serialization: an interchange is read from UNB through UNZ, including the UNH/UNT message header and trailer.
• Round-trips in both directions — EDI text to records, and records back to conformant EDI text with the UNT segment count recomputed.
• Generated from the UN/EDIFACT D03A directory with the Ballerina EDI tool, so the records follow the published specification.

Quickstart

To use the edifact.d03a.retail package in your Ballerina application, modify the .bal file as follows:

Step 1: Import the module

Import the package and the submodules for the messages you handle.

import ballerina/io;
import ballerinax/edifact.d03a.retail;
import ballerinax/edifact.d03a.retail.mGENRAL;

Step 2: Read an EDI message

Convert an EDIFACT interchange into a Ballerina record.

public function main() returns error? {
    string ediText = check io:fileReadString("genral.edi");
    mGENRAL:EDI_GENRAL_GENRAL message =
        check retail:fromEdiString(ediText, retail:EDI_GENRAL).ensureType();
    io:println(message);
}

retail:getEDINames() returns every message name this package supports. interchangeFromEdiString gives access to the full UNB/UNZ interchange, and headersFromEdiString reads just the headers.

Step 3: Write an EDI message

Convert a Ballerina record back into an EDIFACT interchange.

string ediText = check retail:toEdiString(message, retail:EDI_GENRAL);

Use interchangeToEdiString to write the full interchange rather than the message body alone.

Step 4: Run the Ballerina application

bal run

Supported messages