The MEDICI Electronic Data Interchange Library


OVERVIEW

The goal of MEDICI is to produce a library of code which allows EDI
applications to be written without the author having to worry about
the complexities various standards involved. It achieves this by
abstracting the details of the EDI stream behind a number of objects
which can be easily manipulated by the programmer through method
calls. Bindings to various scripting languages will give users the
power to quickly assemble applications which understand EDI messages
and integrate them into existing components.

MEDICI operates as a stream-oriented parser similar to the Expat
library for XML documents. The application creates an instance of a
parser object, registers callbacks with it, and then feeds it the EDI
document. As the parser object decodes the stream the callbacks are
triggered as various events are encountered. MEDICI takes care of
ensuring the correct format and structure of the source document and
optionally takes care of validating segments. Deviations from the
published standards may be accomodated with "pragmas". This allows the
calling application to state which errors are too trivial to cause the
parser to halt.

Through the callbacks MEDICI passes references to data dictionaries
and context information which allows the application to understand the
structure of a message and provide semantics for the component parts.

At a later date it is the intention to also provide an application
framework utilising MEDICI which can provide some level of support for
conducting business based on EDI interchanges, but for now this is
left as an excercise for the reader ;)


TELESMART API

Value Added Network - Edifact Commands And Acknowledgements
By Telesmart API Ltd and TeleOrdering Ltd
  
Whitaker (owners of TeleOrdering) is now part of VNU. The
specification document (docs/telesmart.txt) is attributed to them. The
specification document and derived works are included in this project
with the kind permission of the IT Director, VNU Entertainment Media
Ltd.

This project has no other connection with Telesmart, TeleOrdering,
Whitaker or VNU.