TRADACOMS invoice help (EDI Invoice)

Question

I am trying to understand EDI invoices using tradacoms standards, I have found some information in order to read an invoice but it is not sufficient. Does anybody has any sample or idea for importing tradacom invoice to business objects using .NET? I have tried reading Tradacom Syntax manual, it just defines the segments which is fine but I wanted to know in more detail with any sample will be of great help.

I am quite stuck with data elements for example the line below:

ILD=1+1+:8408++:31266+0+2:2500:KG+54300+135800+Z+0+++SILVERSIDE 1-5 KG'

Now, ILD is invoice details, "=" defines data element value in segment, "+" separates the value for one data element to another but what I don't understand is what is what, like what is "1+1+:8408", I mean line number, customer number, product code etc etc and so on.

Can someone please shed some light to it? I will be really grateful.

Answer 1

Tradacom is an edi format, only used in UK.
It is not maintained or changed since 1995 (I think); AFIAK there is no official place to get the docs. ANA UK was the maintainer (GS1 UK); maybe they have copies, just try. Otherwise you should be able to get a copy of invoice documentation from your edi trading partner. (Invoice has its own documentation, apart from eg the syntax guidelines you mention).
Use an edi translator to parse this file, and translate this to an import/export format suited for your ERP software.
Bots (http://bots.sourceforge.net) is open source edi software that handles Tradacoms.

Answer 2

There is a Tradacoms "UtilityBill" example with sample EDI file and some POCO classes in the Edi.Net lib. It is written in C#.

While this can help out extremely if you got the reference for the EDI transaction type (UTLHDR in your case), you can't do much if you don't. So check the Tradacoms syntax manual and ask for the reference

Disclaimer I wrote the library.