DataDirect XML Converters™ - 3.2 Release Highlights

Overview

DataDirect XML Converters™ are high-performance Java™ and .NET components that provide bi-directional, programmatic access to virtually any non-XML file including EDI, flat files, and other legacy formats. DataDirect XML Converters allow developers to seamlessly stream any non-XML data as XML to industry-leading XML processing components or to any application. They support StAX, SAX, XmlReader, XmlWriter, DOM and I/O streaming interfaces, and can be embedded directly for transformation purposes, or as part of a chain of programs including XSLT and XQuery, or even inside XML pipelines. DataDirect XML Converters maximize developer productivity and provide a fast, scalable solution for converting between EDI and other legacy formats and XML. More information is available at www.xmlconverters.com.

Highlights of the DataDirect XML Converters 3.2 release include:

• Updated EDI support
• Support for EDIG@S – An EDI standard for gas companies, and a European subset of EDIFACT

Summary of what’s new in Release 3.2

• EDI Support – DataDirect XML Converters 3.2 includes the latest versions of the X12, HL7, and IATA vertical standards. This allows customers to use the latest versions of these standards and seamlessly interoperate with their trading partners, who may be using different versions of the standards.
• EDIG@S Support – EDIG@S is an EDI standard based on the European subset of EDIFACT, used by gas companies to exchange vast amounts of information to handle dispatch and operational information. DataDirect XML Converters now support the transformation of EDIG@S messages into other EDI messages, such as EDIFACT, or into XML and vice-versa, enabling exchange of energy information.

Summary of Previous Releases

Release 3.1:

• HL7 Support – HL7 is a standard for the exchange, management and integration of healthcare information to support patient care. Current versions of HL7 are XML-based, while previous versions were EDI-based only. DataDirect XML Converters allow the two formats to be easily exchanged, easing the HL7 upgrade burden for healthcare organizations.
• XML Schema – In many cases users need to know what XML Schema is output (or required as input) by a converter; DataDirect XML Converters provide a dynamic way to get to that information.
• Standard Exchange Format (SEF) support - SEF is a common way to specify the structure of an EDI document. It is useful to describe customizations that often occur in the use of EDI messages. DataDirect XML Converters provide an additional way for companies to support their custom EDI needs.

Release 3.0: Initial Product Release - provides the following features:

• Native support for Java and .NET — DataDirect XML Converters are highly scalable Java and .NET components. The Java version is written in pure Java and has no application server requirements. The .NET implementation is written entirely in C#.
• Support for many EDI schemas and flat file types – Full support for X12, EDIFACT, EANCOM, IATA, and flat files (this includes CSV, Tab delimited, JSON, dBASE, and more).
• Support for wide variety of custom files – DataDirect XML Converters support the definition of custom conversions for transforming custom flat file types to XML. Use Stylus Studio to graphically create the custom conversion definition and deploy it using DataDirect XML Converters.
• Streaming support delivers performance and scalability enhancements – Performance enhancements have been made to further optimize the transformation of large EDI and flat files to XML and vice-versa. The underlying streaming architecture and use of the supported streaming APIs drastically reduces the amount of memory required when processing large documents.
• Fully embeddable – Both the Java and .NET implementations of the DataDirect XML Converters are fully embeddable in applications – including support for any J2EE or .NET application server and even XQuery and XSLT implementations.
• Support for StAX, SAX, XmlReader, and XmlWriter – DataDirect XML Converters provide full support for the standard streaming XML APIs for both Java and .NET.
• Support for custom EDI messages -Supports the definition of custom EDI messages from scratch or based on a specific version/sub-version of the standard, but requiring additional sets of EDI groups, segments, composites or elements.
• On the fly EDI validation -While converting EDI to XML and XML to EDI a variety of validation tasks are performed on the fly. For example, syntax checking, presence of mandatory segments, EDI version numbers consistent with message structure, automatic conversion of dates and more.