How to make inbound 997's catalogue themselves

In Gentran for Windows, the document browsers show you the Document Name and the Reference Data.

When you create a map, for say an 810, you typically capture the BIG02 Invoice Number and use a standard rule to update Document Record assign to DocumentName, right? And if BIG04 Purchase Order Number is available, you may assign that to ReferenceData. This makes it nice browse and find your invoices in the system. And you do the equivalent with any document, inbound or outbound.

You've noticed that the outbound 997's like to mark their referenced group control numbers (AK102) in DocumentName and group status (AK901) in ReferenceData. How nice! If you only had the group id (AK101) in there as well, you could nicely cross-reference your outbound 997's to your inbound functional groups.

But the inbound 997's catalogue nothing in the metadata. (Bummer) Like, if you received a negative 997, you'd like to know which one, right? Oh I know it'll mark your outbound group as failed, but just try finding that 997 in the In Drawer. After all, they might have sent you some AK3's and AK4's to tell you why.

If you want the 997, you can always do a file search: you know, browse into Documents/#year/month/day and search for AK1*IN*653~ ... provided you know the delimiters it came in with. But to find it by query or document browser requires that the 997 catalogue itself in the metadata.

The only solution is to modify the 997 break map.

Caution: Modifying build and break maps is systems level stuff and is not supported by Sterling, so be sure to keep backups so you can rollback if something goes wrong. If you mess up and you need Sterling to help you fix it, the support call may be expensive.

What I always do is to write an extended rule on AK101 [0479], something like this:

string[40] id;

id = #0479 + "*" + #0028; // Essentially, AK101*AK102
update Document set DocumentName = id;

Then down on AK901 [0715], I use a standard rule to update Document-ReferenceData.

Now when you browse inbound 997's, you'll see a DocumentName like "IN*653" with ReferenceData = "A".

Another beauty of this is that you can easily query your inbound 997's directly;

select DocumentName, ReferenceData
from Document_tb
where Direction=0 and TransactionSetID='997'
and ReferenceData in ('E', 'P', 'R')
order by DateCreated desc

You can even write monitoring code that not only finds your failed outbounds, but cross-references the negative 997's that indicated the failure.

Now isn't that just simply lovely.

One disclaimer: I've noticed that Gentran for Windows seems to indicate a translation failure in the audit log when this modified 997 break map runs. It works correctly, and does update the outbound status as expected, but for some reason it reports an error to the audit log. I haven't figured this one out yet. Still, a minor nuisance on the audit log is a small price to pay for the ability to cross-reference your 997's.