Our Scenario

It's always easiest to understand a problem if you can wrap a real world scenario around it. We describe here the scenario that we will be using in this tutorial.

Our scenario takes an XML Purchase Order that already exists on the harddrive (say, previously exported from a backend database system), applies a Stylesheet to transform it for preparation to apply an xmlLinguist map to it. The map is executed, with the resulting 850 file saved back to file. All of this will be pieced together with a VBScript and automated via the Windows' Scheduler.

The goal here is to translate an XML Purchase Order into an EDI 850 Document. While the 850 is a standard document, most XML Purchase Orders are custom. We've decided to use what we feel to be a common problem on the web, using a custom XML Document generated from a PayPal web notification.

When PayPal receives a payment, say from an eBay auction, an HTML Post can be submitted to a custom website. We create a PHP script to generate this XML document for our tutorial.

• PO.xml : the original XML Purchase Order
• POto850.xsl : the stylesheet used to prepare the XML doc for xmlLinguist
• 850.xml : Result of the stylesheet above, for testing purposes only
• 850.ltm : the xmlLinguist map for the X12 850 EDI document
• POto850.vbs : the VBScript that ties everything together
• 850.txt : the final result EDI document outputted from the script.

These files are all in one ZIP file, xml-to-edi-850.zip. Download the ZIP file and extract them to C:\xml-to-edi-850 since this is where the VB script assumes the files are located. If they are not put here, then make sure you update your VBScript.

Remember, that in addition to the above files, you need xmlLinguist as well as the xmlLinguist Translation Engine, or LTE for short.

Moving on...