SAP B1 ERP and MRP application could be easily integrated with your Electronic Document Interchange channel, either for outbound (when you are ordering products from your vendors) or inbound (when your customers places their orders in EDI code). In this small article, we would like to give your SB1 EDI programming and deployment highlights:
1. EDI as fixed length fields format. This is traditional EDI, when you have document header, lines and trailer. All the fields have predetermined fixed length and position
2. EDI as XML. This is new trend, where XML does the same job as fixed length format, mentioned above. If your EDI channel requires XML, you are probably more flexible in the tools and coding methods selection
3. Outbound EDI. You should either research SB1 tables structure, which is described in SAP Business One SDK. Another option is to enable system information in SB: View -> System Information. If it is enabled, open your Purchase Order and place the cursor over the field you want to export in EDI code – in the left bottom corner you should now see the table and the field names. To format your records in fixed field length manner, use CAST or CONVERT SQL clauses. Save your EDI export in the text file – you should consider deploying DTS (Data Transformation) package to extract records and save the file. For XML you have robust support in MS SQL Server 2005 or 2000
4. Inbound EDI. Here we recommend DTW or SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench. However you do not use here CSV files (also often referred as Excel templates). Here you deploy ODBC source to MS SQL Server. From MS SQL side you should prepare views or SQL stored procedures. Again, deploy DTS package, which will first move your EDI file into SQL staging tables. Then from these tables, use View to prepare the results for Workbench. To avoid linking and configuration problems, in your SQL view – have field names to be the same as in Workbench Excel template for the same object, you are intending to integrate.
