Frequently Asked Questions / Anveo EDI Connect / Value translations and cross-references in table EDI Contact

Value translations and cross-references in table EDI Contact

When you import data from a file, it might be necesssary to translate some values so that they can be used inside NAV. For example EDIFACT: everyone familiar with this topic knows the different customer / vendor types: suppliers, buyer, invoicee, delivery party, etc., with their corresponding abbreviations: SU, BY, IV, DP, … But in NAV it is more likely to stumble across the sell-to or bill-to customer, the ship-to address, the buy-from or the pay-to vendor. In order to match and translate these values, EDI Connect offers the possibility to use value translations.

The list of value translations can be accessed via the menu: Departments -> Administration -> Application Setup -> Anveo EDI -> Settings -> EDI Value Translation List:

EDI Value Translation List

A typical value translation card for the EDIFACT NAD types could look like this:

Value Translation Card

The data type can be anything of Text, Code, Integer, Option, Decimal or blank, for the latter one you need to check the corresponding box. The card above shows EDIFACT NAD type translations for incoming data, for example the value of “BY” is translated to “3=Sell-to Customer”. The numbers correspond directly to the option field “Type” in the table “EDI Contact”, when you import a contact with the EDIFACT type “BY”, it will be created as a “Sell-to Customer”.

Where do you use this value translation? – In your EDIFACT mapping on the EDI Contact loop. You use the code of the value translation as a constant filter value for external type translation: “External Type Translation”=CONST(EDIFACT_NAD). When you write the EDIFACT type value to the field “External Type”, EDI Connect will now automatically try to translate it to the NAV type and write it to the EDI Contact type:

EDI Contacts with both external and “internal” type

Now we have translated the external type to an internal one that is usable in NAV. This procedure applies to every other import where your message provides different contact types. It is not EDIFACT-specific, it can be used for XML or text imports as well. And yes, you can use it for export too.

What about the cross references? In the last picture above you can see some GLNs / ILNs in the column “External No.” and for the buyer’s GLN there’s a customer no. This customer no. was automatically fetched from the database by a cross reference. The cross reference list is located in the EDI menu above the one for the value translations, a common cross reference looks like this:

Cross Reference for customer’s GLN

Here the NAV customer no. is searched by the field “GLN” from the table “Customer”. Of course this is only successfull if the data is maintained properly. Again you provide the cross reference in the EDI Contact loop via the following filter string: “External Identification Type”=CONST(GLN). If you write the GLN to the field “External Identification” like above, the module tries to identify the customer by it’s GLN and write the customer no. back to the EDI Contact. For the Sell-to, Bill-to and Ship-to customer the EDI Document is updated automatically too.