[moistly]

EDI is an awesome spec, and I mean that in the “Mt. Everest is awesome” sense: it is an incredibly detailed tome covering every conceivable business data exchange; with an encoding protocol that is very efficient/succinct.

If you have access to the spec, EDI is easy and kind of fun, if you’re into parsing and manipulating data.

It is in no way an API. It’s a spec that tells you in painful detail how to write out your B2B quotes/orders/corrections/receipts/etc.

[femto113]

Ironically, despite the elaborate spec most participants will wind up just using an ad hoc convention of embedding critical information in non-semantic text fields (or "note segments") with bespoke codes & delimiters.

[warpspin]

> If you have access to the spec, EDI is easy and kind of fun, if you’re into parsing and manipulating data.

Yeah. And for the next business partner, you will have the same kind of "fun". And for the one after that, again. Ad infinitum.

In the real world, you will not even handle simple stuff like purchase orders without some kind of special case for every customer. Not in the parsing part, that's the one thing that works pretty well, but in how to interpret the data afterwards.