Glossary
Some of these words mean something slightly different in other EDI products. This is what they mean here.
| Word | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Agreement | One document type, in one direction, with one partner. The record that makes a posting send something. Not a contract |
| Acknowledgement | A receipt saying a document arrived and was accepted or refused. It comes in two layers, envelope and document, agreed separately. Not the same as an order confirmation |
| Anchor | The record a message belongs to: a sales order, a purchase order, a project or a free text invoice. What puts it on a flow tracker |
| Business process | Where a document sits in the order flow. What the module routes on, rather than the document type |
| Compare | Holding a staged inbound document against your own data before anything is created. Produces green, yellow or red |
| Correlation | The match between an arriving receipt and the message it answers. Recorded with its confidence, so a receipt that matched nothing is visible as such rather than believed |
| Dialect | Two sets of document types on one syntax. OIOUBL 2.1 and Peppol BIS are both UBL, share root elements, and are judged by different rules |
| Document type | A specific document in a specific format, such as EDIFACT INVOIC. Extensible: you can add your own |
| Envelope | The wrapper around one or more business documents, carrying who sent it and who it is for |
| Format | The wire language: EDIFACT, X12, UBL, or one of your own |
| Identifier | The number a company is addressed by on the wire: a GLN, a CVR number, a VAT number |
| Interchange | One transmission. It may carry several business documents |
| Lifecycle stage | How far a message got: created, transmitted, stored, processed or rejected. Not whether it is healthy |
| Link | The record tying a partner to a customer or vendor account, in one company, under one identifier |
| Message | One transmission, in one direction, as recorded in the log. Everything known about it hangs off this row. An acknowledgement is a message here and is never billed, and your agreement is what defines the billable unit |
| Order change | A later document about an order the other side already has, naming only the lines that differ and the action on each. Not a replacement, which is the whole order sent again |
| Organisation | You, on the wire. The identifiers one of your legal entities answers to |
| Partner | The company at the other end. One record, shared across your legal entities |
| Posting gate | Validation that runs inside the posting, and can refuse it |
| Ruleset | A Schematron rule set uploaded for one UBL document type and version, either the official one or your own. EDIFACT and X12 are checked against EdiFabric's message templates instead, so the upload refuses a type that is not UBL |
| Staging | Where an inbound document is read to before it becomes a record. It stays afterwards |
| Superseded | Replaced by a newer document of the same kind. Kept, because a partner may have acted on it |
| Transport | One connection: the protocol, the endpoint and the identity we are known by on it. AS2, AS3, AS4 or plain file. It is its own record, and many partners can share one |
| Wire file | The document exactly as sent or received. Readable from the message for as long as the platform holds it, which your agreement states |
Three that are easy to confuse
Confirmation and acknowledgement. A confirmation is a business answer: yes, at that price, on that date. An acknowledgement is a receipt: it arrived, and it was accepted or refused. A partner can acknowledge an order and never confirm it.
Change and replacement. A change names the lines that differ, each with its own action, and only those lines move. A replacement is the whole order sent a second time, and the order is rewritten to match it. The wire says which of the two a document is, and the module does not guess.
Format mapping and model mapping. Both are Electronic Reporting configurations. Export binds the format mapping; import binds the model mapping. Swapping them produces an import that runs and lands nothing.
Not applicable and unavailable. Not applicable means no validator covers the document’s format. Unavailable means one does and it could not give a verdict, because the rule set has not been uploaded, the licence did not arrive, or the engine failed. Neither one blocks a posting.