Sending an EDI

Acknowledgment
Acknowledgments indicate the status of EDI message transmission. After BizTalk Server
receives an EDI interchange, it will return one or more acknowledgments to the sender of an
EDI interchange, depending upon which acknowledgments have been enabled.
Based on the level of validation, EDI message acknowledgments fall into two types:

A Functional Acknowledgment generated as a result of body validation. The

functional acknowledgment reports each error encountered while processing the
received document.

A Technical Acknowledgment generated as a result of header validation. The

technical acknowledgment reports the status of the processing of an interchange
header and trailer by the address receiver.

BizTalk Server can return both technical and functional acknowledgments in response to a
single interchange. BizTalk Server returns a single technical acknowledgment for each
interchange. For X12 interchanges, it will return a functional acknowledgment for each group
received. For EDIFACT interchanges, it will return a functional acknowledgment for each
interchange, no matter how many groups that interchange contains.

X12 Acknowledgments
X12 Technical Acknowledgment
A positive TA1 acknowledgment is sent if the ISA header and the IEA trailer of an X12
message are valid (irrespective of other content). For more information on the contents of a
TA1 acknowledgment, see X12 TA1 Acknowledgment.
X12 Functional Acknowledgment
A 997 acknowledgment is used to acknowledge receipt of an interchange or a functional
group, to accept or reject one or more functional groups or one or more transactions, and to
verify and report compliance with the standard. If BizTalk Server receives an interchange
with multiple groups, it will return an acknowledgment for each group. If a group contains
multiple transaction sets, the acknowledgment for that group will contain multiple AK2
loops, one for each transaction set, depending upon whether AK2 loops are generated for
accepted transaction sets. For more information on the contents of a 997 acknowledgment,
see X12 997 Acknowledgment.

Note

When the EDI receive pipeline builds the Functional Group Header (GS) segment for the X12
functional ACK, the Application Sender Code (GS02) and Application Receiver Code (GS03) are

taken from the functional group being acknowledged. However, GS02 on incoming message is
mapped to GS03 on the ACK and GS03 on incoming message is mapped to GS02 on the ACK.

cknowledgments
EDIFACT Technical Acknowledgment
For EDIFACT, a separate technical acknowledgment is not used, but sections of the
functional acknowledgment or CONTRL ACK (see below) are reused for the receipt ACK. This
emulates a technical acknowledgment.
For more information on the technical CONTRL acknowledgment, see EDIFACT CONTRL
Message as Technical Acknowledgment.
EDIFACT Functional Acknowledgment
For EDIFACT, the functional CONTRL acknowledgment is used to acknowledge a received
interchange, group, and message; accept or reject a received interchange, group, and
message; and to list any syntactical errors or unsupported functionality contained in them.
The CONTRL ACK reports the results of a syntactical check of the complete received
interchange.