Introduction

Over the years, I have worked on many EDI systems, from designing them from scratch to adding on to existing systems.

While the Gentran for Windows and GIS mapping tool works quite well, programming techniques often used render the maps very difficult to maintain.

At one client where I did some work, the existing maps they had were so terribly written I could hardly believe that they worked at all. They had terribly inconsistent variable naming, with improperly used global scope; very sloppy field names, and a tremendous amount of cryptic, redundant extended rules. For this map I was assigned to correct a bug, and it took me three days to trace all the code to figure out what the author intended the map to do.

EDI maps usually have a long life, and must be written for maintainability by the client. Clean design also makes them much easier to trace and debug. And by isolating certain variables, you can allow the client to control such options extenally without having to modify the map.

In this blog I shall discuss techniques that I have developed over the years that are proven to result in stable, maintainable maps with a good production life.