Background

CLEO Integrator (EEI) can support non-standard (or, proprietary) EDI documents with certain constraints and limitations. These types of files can be considered fixed length or delimited files.
To eliminate the need for CLEO/EXTOL custom coding additions to the data analysis program, a proprietary set of envelope records has been defined. These records, when properly constructed and placed at the beginning and end of a block of proprietary data, will provide sufficient information to the data analysis program to identify the type of proprietary data, the trading partner ID, the assigned group, document type, and message class (map) to be used for translation.

CLEO Enveloping

The CLEO/EXTOL proprietary envelope segments are modeled after both the X12 ISA-GS-ST-SE-GE-IEA segments and the UN/EDIFACT UNB-UNG-UNH-UNT-UNE-UNZ segments.

The design goals on which the CLEO/EXTOL envelope segments are based are:

• Enable all functionality currently available in X12 and EDIFACT envelopes
• Allow for simple implementations by requiring only a minimal set of mandatory elements
• Use fixed-length syntax (no element delimiters) in the envelope segments themselves
• Provide a “short” version of envelope segments enabling most functionality within 80-byte records
• Provide a “long” version of envelope segments (EDIFACT-lengths for IDs, control numbers, etc.)
• Permit fixed-length data segments of any reasonable length (up to 99999)

CLEO/EXTOL Tech Memos

• #42 -- Proprietary Document Support
• #45 -- Proprietary Record Set-ups

CLEO/EXTOL Blog Posts

• Dealing with Proprietary Flat File Data (Part 1)
• Dealing with Proprietary Flat File Data (Part 2)

Q&A

• Flat File Question and Answer