Standards Language


In EDI, you are basically replacing paper documents with electronic documents. The elements that comprise these electronic documents, and the documents themselves, have their own terminology which you must learn before working with the standard.

An EDI document, like a Purchase Order, is referred to as a transaction or transaction set. A transaction set is a complete set of information  - a document.

An individual line of information within the transaction set is called a segment.

Each word that makes up the line is called an element. An element is a single field of information in an EDI segment. Each item of information is referred to as an element.

EDI documents, or transaction sets, are identified by a 3-digit code. A Purchase Order, for example, is an 850 document.

Each element in a segment is separated with a unique character, just as words in a sentence are separated with spaces. The separator is called a delimiter. The most commonly used delimiter in EDI is the asterisk (*).  Delimiters are the specific characters divide elements in a segment and also mark the beginning and end of segments. A delimiter is analogous to punctuation in a sentence. Your EDI system must know what delimiters are used before it can parse information from an EDI document.

The format, or layout, of a transaction set is called the syntax. The syntax specifies the rules for putting the transaction set together, including the correct order of its segments.