Preprocessing EDI files so they can be imported into EnterWorks using Import templates.
EDI files are comprised of a sequence of Data Elements, with each Data Element having a sequence of fields (by position). Some or all these fields need to be transformed into tabular form for import into EnterWorks. The processing that accomplishes this reads each data element sequentially, extracting the values from one or more fields in each data element, placing those values into a "staging bucket" and at appropriate times, writes the contents of the "staging bucket" to the corresponding target file. The specific behavior for an EDI file as to what Data Elements are expected, what fields to extract, what target files to create and when to write records to those files is defined in an EDI Specification.