About
Nobody plans to work in EDI. Almost everyone here arrived sideways.
I'm Samuel Sope, and I'm learning EDI in the open. This site is where I write down what I work out.
There is no EDI degree. No course, no obvious path in, no shelf of books. Most people doing this picked it up from whoever held the job before them and filled the gaps by searching. That is how I got here too.
The searching is the part that does not work. You get vendor pages that explain what a transaction set is and stop exactly where it gets interesting, forum threads from 2009 with no replies, and standards documents written for people who already understand them.
So I read the public standards, work through what they actually mean, and publish the page I wish I had found. If you came to EDI the same way, this is for you.
How this site works
There are two kinds of thing here, and the difference is deliberate.
Notes are short and dated. They are me thinking out loud, and some of them will turn out to be wrong. I leave them up with corrections, because the wrong turns are often the useful part.
Reference pages are the checked version. Once I understand something well enough to be useful to someone at two in the morning with a rejected file, it graduates into one of those.
Where this comes from
Public standards documentation, openly published implementation material, and the specifications themselves, read carefully and explained in plain language. Sources are linked on every page.
Every example here is constructed. The identifiers, control numbers and partner names are invented, so nothing on this site is anyone's real traffic.
Corrections welcome
I am learning this as I write it, so I will get things wrong. If you spot something, tell me. I fix it, note what changed, and credit you.