Generating Functional Acknowledgments
A functional acknowledgment (FA) is a type of EDI transaction set that acknowledges the receipt, as well as the structural and syntactical validity of an EDI document. When you receive a document, you can choose to generate an FA, which sends an EDI FA document to the sender to acknowledge receipt of the document. FAs validate and acknowledge only the syntax of the document, not that the document has been processed or understood by the receiver.
Module for EDI provides a built-in service that you can invoke to generate an FA. The service does not specify what to do with the FA that it creates. You must add additional logic to your service to deliver the FA to the sender of the original document.
FAs can also be generated automatically using the FAGeneration/autoGenerateFA EDITPA variable. For more information, see webMethods Module for EDI Installation and User’s Guide.
The following diagram illustrates the basics of the FA generation process. For more information, see the table following this diagram.
Step | Description |
1 | The sender creates a client to send an EDI document to the receiver. |
2 | The EDI document is passed to the service that you create to process the EDI document in the edidata pipeline variable. You add logic to your service to invoke the built-in service that Module for EDI provides to generate the FA. To generate the FA, the built-in service uses the flat file schema associated with the inbound document's EDI standard, version, and transaction set to validate the inbound EDI document. Additionally, the built-in service uses a flat file schema associated with the FA's EDI standard and version to properly create the FA. |
3 | Your service delivers the FA to the sender by performing logic that you define. |
4 | |
For information about how to add logic to services to generate FAs, see webMethods Module for EDI Installation and User’s Guide.
