Wildcards in Enveloping (Outbound) Work

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For Inbound envelopes, a wildcard value in the envelope matches any value in the input document, while an empty value in the envelope matches only an empty value in the input document. For Outbound envelopes, a wildcard value is equivalent to an empty value in the envelope. You can override wildcards with specific EDI values in outbound processing. You must supply the EDI data to the business process and the data must be in the correct format (that is, name/value pairs).

One option is to use the lightweight JDBC adapter to pull fields in from database tables. Whatever method you choose to retrieve the fields, the results must be given to the Correlation service, which places them into process data. Passing the data to the Correlation service must be the last step in the business process before running the EDI Encoder service. When the EDI Encoding service runs, it uses the same best-match process detailed in the Inbound section to determine which envelope to use. When the X12 or EDIFACT envelope service runs, any envelope field values set in the Correlation service overrides those values defined in the envelope definition.

Note: If you are using wildcards for outbound acknowledgements (997 and CONTRL messages) so that you can have acknowledgements automatically generated from the values in the inbound document, you must use the “*” (asterisk) wildcard instead of an empty value (null) for a parameter.

Additionally, when using wildcards for outbound acknowledgements, you do not need to use the lightweight JDBC adapter or the Correlation service to place values in process data. In this scenario, Sterling B2B Integrator automatically retrieves the values from the inbound document (if these values are present) and uses those values to generate the outbound acknowledgement.

When setting up your outbound processing, consider that:

  • If an envelope field contains a wildcard, you must supply a correlation value for it or the service halts with an error.
  • You can override wildcard values in an envelope by using the Correlation service to pass name/value pairs from the primary document to the EDI Encoder service.
  • If an envelope contains specific values in the Sender ID, Sender ID Qualifier, Receiver ID, or Receiver ID Qualifier fields (that is, values other than a wildcard), the values passed from the Correlation service to the EDI Encoder service do not overwrite the values in the fields.
  • If you are using the same envelope for inbound processing and acknowledgements, supply the Sender ID, Receiver ID, and Qualifiers in the envelope so that they are not overwritten by the correlation values.