WHAT2DO.TXT - What to do with the IT Solutions EDI Pseudo Printer ----------------------------------------------------------------- This file is a narrative of what to do with the IT Solutions EDI Pseudo Printer package accompanying this file. 1) Install the Package If you are reading this file, you have either already 1) unzipped the "disk image" downloaded from CompuServe or 2) downloaded the six files of the "disk image" by ftp, and copied the files to their own directory. The file INSTALL.TXT gives some details on installing the product all at once or in pieces, if you so desire. It is strongly advised just to run INSTALL.BAT and let it put files where it wants to, namely C:\ITSEDIPP and C:\WINDOWS, otherwise, there will be a bunch of parameters you'll have to tweak to make the demo run right. Run INSTALL.BAT from the DOS prompt, not in Windows. When asked, choose demo 6. If you want the demo to work perfectly all the way through to submitting mail, then you have to create the mail alias "editest" in your mail system address book. This step is not attempted by any part of the install procedure, because it varys too much from system to system. Note that this step is not absolutely necessary for running the demo and seeing the results; without it you'll just have to imagine how the generated message would be submitted to the mail system in the end. 2) Print out the Documentation After installing the package, you will find several documentation files in C:\ITSEDIPP\DOC\. The main document is ITSEDIPP.WPD. If you have WordPerfect for Windows v6, this is the one to look at. If you have WinWord or an older WordPerfect, you can load the file ITSEDIPP.DOC, but not regenerate the table of contents; this result will still be good for printing and reading. If you have neither, then you can just print out ITSEDIPP.TXT to a dumb printer and you'll still have a satisfactory version of the documentation. Subsidiary documentation for the components of ITSEDIPP can be found in the files ITSPPD.*, ITSCTRL.* and GAWKDLL.* in the C:\ITSEDIPP\DOC directory. The comments above about choice of text editor apply to these, too. Two overview diagrams of the product in COMPONEN.WPD and OVERVIEW.WPD are really very useful for understanding the product. You should by all means get a printout of these diagrams, if possible by loading them into WordPerfect for Windows v6, but if necessary by e-mailing or ringing up my company so that we can fax or e-mail you an image of them. 3) Run the Demo Start up Windows and open the IT Solutions EDI Pseudo Printer program group. In it you'll find an icon for "Purchase Order"; open it. I'm making an assumption that you have Excel on your computer, most computers in business do. You'll see a simplified purchase order to trading partner "CompTIA" consisting of two line items. What you need to do is "print" this purchase order to the "IT Solutions EDI Pseudo Printer on PseudoPort" printer. From the File menu, choose "EDI Print" (provided the Excel macro got installed correctly). Then, away it goes. First the raw text from the purchase order is captured and dumped to a file. Then ITSCTRL takes over and calls GAWKDLL as necessary to transform the input into an EDI message. There are some informational message boxes along the way, to which you should answer "OK". Finally, you're given a last chance to cancel the e-mailing of the message. If you don't cancel, then ITSCTRL tries to e-mail the message to the Lotus VIM interface, which will reach cc:Mail or Lotus Notes mail, if present. Don't worry if the mailing fails; the resulting intermediate files will then be copied to the C:\ITSEDIPP\FAILED directory. 4) Look at What the Demo Produced Open up the File Manager and navigate to the directory C:\ITSEDIPP. Under it you'll see several directories. If the e-mailing failed, or you cancelled the mailing, all of the resulting files discussed below will be in the FAILED directory. Otherwise, first look in the RAW directory. All of the raw text versions of the files printed to the driver appear here. Open up the last one to convince yourself that it contains what was shown on the screen in Excel with the purchase order. Then go up and down to the TOKEN directory. Here you will find a tokenized version of the RAW data file. Then go up and down to the DATA directory. The files here contain the extracted detail line data from the files with the same numerical suffixes as in the RAW directory. Open the last one and you'll see the two detail lines from the purchase order. Then go up and down to the FLAT directory. Here you'll find the verbose message output files. Look at the last one; it contains sender information, receipient information, and detail line information. From here you can switch over to the Program Manager, IT Sol... program group and choose ITSEDIPP.INI to see where the sender information came from and choose PARTNERS.INI to see where the partner data in the verbose files came from. The sender information came from the assignments in the stage specific section for the "Flat Stage". The recipient information came from the section of PARTNERS.INI having the name of the partner. Note that the name of the last partner to which a message was sent was stored temporarily in one of the last entries of the first section of ITSEDIPP.INI. Note that the sender-specific sequence number is stored and incremented in one of the first entries of the first section of ITSEDIPP.INI. Note also that a recipient-specific sequence number is kept in each partner's section in PARTNERS.INI. Now go up and down to the EDI directory. Here you'll find the EDIFACT versions of the files in the ASCII directory. Even less excitement, but we're almost done. Finally, if you have a mail system on your machine and the message was successfully submitted to it, then you can look at either the editest Outbox or, if the message is already gone by now, the Inbox attached to the editest alias name, wherever that is. 5) Change Something and Try the Demo Again Two easy things to change are a) insert an additional detail line into the purchase order in the same format as the other two and b) change the partner name to one of the others in the PARTNER.INI file, such as "HP". Run the demo again. See what happens. Look at the files generated. 6) Look at the Script Files This step is only for those technically inclined or curious. But you can navigate to the C:\ITSEDIPP\AWK directory, open the AWK script files, print them out and see if you can figure out what is going on. It helps if you've seen AWK programs before. Having printouts of the files ITSEDIPP.INI and PARTNERS.INI will help, too. If you have some database program which can read .DBF files, you can open and print out the contents of PRODUCT.DBF, too.