Segment and Group Identifiers for EDIFACT

This article is further to my earlier article on Segment and Group Identifiers for X12. In this article I discuss how I apply this technique to EDIFACT.

With EDIFACT there are no tables of Header, Detail, Summary. Even though the transaction set (called Message in EDIFACT) still conceptually has that structure, the segments are numbered sequentially straight through. They use 4-digit numbers, so we just use the same methodology. The segment groups each have their own unique 4-digit sequence number, distinct from the segments (so nice!), and are in themselves sequentially numbered, making for a nice little naming convention we can put in the group descriptions.

Looking at the D.00A ORDERS as an example, I would identify the first few segments with descriptions like this:

0020_BGM  Beginning of Message
0030_DTM  Date/Time/Period
0040_PAI  Payment Instructions
0050_ALI  Additional Information
0060_IMD  Item Description
0070_FTX  Free Text
0080_GIR  Related Identification Numbers
0090_RFF  SG1: RFF-DTM
 0100_RFF  Reference
 0110_DTM  Date/Time/Period
...

Notice the 0090, which is the first segment group. I always put SG1, SG2, ... into the description followed by the segment id range as is normally found in the EDIFACT documentation. Also, I don't worry about the _grp suffix, since it has a unique number anyway. I only added the _grp in X12 because I needed it to make the identifier unique. It is perfectly appropriate to be consistent and name it 0090_RFF_grp if you prefer.

Once again, this naming convention always pays off with much-more readable, and less error-prone extended rules, and a much more maintainble map for the client.