Oracle Document Editor - Defining a custom message (Part 1 of 3)

Oracle Document Editor is an application used for creating and testing document definitions for Oracle B2B.

The document definition (ECS) file is required in B2B for translating and validating documents.

With Document Editor you are able to create new guideline documents or use a template from the comprehensive library of standards available for download. You can download Document Editor and the standard definitions available here.

The available document guideline templates include EDI, HL7, positional flat file (which includes some SAP iDocs), XMLSchema and so on, as seen below.

Thanks to the countless templates available you can easily and quickly create a message definition (ECS) and respective XSD to import to B2B. Making the necessary changes if needed.

Below is an example of a message definition from the template library.

However, specially with Positional Flat File (PFF) messages, you might have to create a custom definition.

In this post I will go through the steps needed to create a custom PFF document definition in Document Editor. This post will be divided in 3 parts, in the first part I will focus on Message Segments', afterwards I'll cover the Field's types and properties, finalizing with testing and XSD generation.

Let's start by creating an empty definition.

The first step will be to create the Message segment, which constitutes the root node.

After defining the root you are able to add two type of child nodes: Segment and Group (of segments).

 I will start by creating the first Segment of the message.

And defining it's properties.

As can be seen above you can define the level of requirement and the number of usages of Segments and Groups. There are various possibilities as for example Mandatory & Must use or Optional & Used.

In the picture below I am creating a Group

And defining it as Optional with the possibility of appearing numerous times.

In the next part I will focus on a Segment's child nodes.