from Hacker News

Translate Between JSON and EDI

by sid6376 on 11/3/22, 12:59 PM with 12 comments

• by pachner on 11/3/22, 4:19 PM

  Stedi is the game changer when it comes to EDI. Let me take you on a journey. My company is building out a TMS for shippers. First few months we would only integrate with carriers that have APIs, because like {bena} said "EDI is a btch", so we wanted to avoid it at all cost. Eventually, it came time for us to take on the dreaded EDI integrations. Oh man, how I hated it. Stack Overflow could not save me. Storing the files on AWS or GCP would have been easy-ish, but then the real challenge of needing a trigger every time a file is drop onto the buckets. GCP has nothing clear. And AWS is evil. So I had to keep looking and looking. And then I remembered a company I chatted with 8 months prior, Stedi. They just now released the feature I was needing. "Buckets and Triggers". It was heaven sent. I could now host my EDI solutions on Stedi ({AnEro} says that it might be cheaper to build it in house. But the thing is, EDI is not our core competency as a company. We want to focus on providing different values for our customers. So would rather not having more technical debt with no meaningful impact.).

  The journey continues...

  Stedi overs 4 pillar features. Buckets, Triggers, Guides, Maps

  The buckets and triggers is what hooked me. The guides and maps is what has been saving me. You see, EDI is a confusing btch. And trying to map out my json to those EDI files is a nightmare. Well, would be a nightmare without Stedi. Their UI makes it simple and easy to do. I'm able to now enjoy life again. Smile, laugh, love. All because of what Stedi is doing to shake up the EDI world.

  In Stedi We Trust.

  DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with Stedi in any way. Not financially nor socially, only emotionally because I love their product that much.

• by bena on 11/3/22, 3:01 PM

  EDI is a bitch. X12 is not great. IIRC, and it's been a while, so I may not, it's essentially a positional Character Separated Value stream. You basically build a string and fill in data or nothing as appropriate. For example the result looks something like

  *START*VALUE1*10.00*BOB*DOLE*100*ADDRESS*STREET*

  Where the double asterisk is where a blank value is.

  However, it is a standard. It is knowable. You can get the ANSI X12 standard for whatever industry you're in and implement this.

  And let's be clear, you still have to do the dirty work with these guys. You still have to map values to fields, which is the hard part of working with the format. Once you have that, you can knock this together fairly simply.

• by davedbase on 11/3/22, 5:12 PM

  Stedi is a fantastic platform. I absolutely despise EDI with a passion and Stedi has saved me from working with it. All their tooling and solutions for buckets, FTP are so well thought out. What a great company and vision to modernize EDI.

• by glitcher on 11/3/22, 2:41 PM

  No option presented for installing locally, must make all calls to their api servers.

• by _-david-_ on 11/3/22, 2:36 PM

  >a new API for creating and validating EDI files that conform to precise trading partner specifications

  Unless you can host this locally this seems like a deal breaker in many industries (healthcare, insurance and perhaps others)