Ok, here's the scenario. We have an in-house web order entry system we're using for internal sales reps. Our Baan admin customized a couple sessions for writing the sales order data into the correct Baan tables, as well as generating the outbound advice. We are, however, encountering a few problems with that system.

A suggested solution was brought up to use the existing EDI functionality of Baan for use with this web order entry system. (fyi, I am not the Baan admin, I work the EDI side of things). I think this could work, however, our current 850 conversion setup is working just fine, and I have no desire to make modifications to it that would result in having to tweak the translation mappings in our EDI system.

My question is, how difficult/what steps are involved in creating a custom 850 sub-type...say an 850W conversion setup in Baan that would allow for importing data specific to the web-entry system (pricebooks, delivery codes, order type, series, etc)? Can I just create a new inbound messge, or copy the existing 850 with a new name and make modifications to it? Or would I have to create the new message and build the conversion setup from scratch?

Thanks...
C-

Chris,

You can copy the 850 message to a new EDI message and alter the conversion setup to reflect the fields you want to read into BAAN. This is pretty straightforward.

However, you will also need to create a DLL to utilize this new conversion setup - this is how BAAN reads information from the ASCII file into the BAAN DB.

You would be best to base the new DLL on the current standard 850 (in) DLL - tdslsdll4280.

Justin