AESDirect - EDI Upload Interface Update - December 19, 2001

This notice is intended for AESDirect Certified software vendors, and other companies in the process of developing this interface.

The following EDI interface update and usage guidance notice is intended to allow AESDirect software vendors to improve the efficiency of their EDI upload to AESDirect. Additional information is available on the AESDirect Developers Center, www.aesdirect.gov/developers.html

E-Mail response address added to X12-601 transaction

At the present time all e-mail responses for shipments submitted by an EDI Upload are returned to the default e-mail address for the AESDirect filing account. To provide more flexibility to return the AES response to the submitting system the following change has been made to the X12 601 message set.

An additional element (element 13) has been added to the BA1 segment. This new element is optional. If included, it should be the e-mail response address to which the shipments final AES response should be sent to.

Please note:

1. The initial AESDirect e-mail response (covering all shipments in the file) will continue to be sent to default address for the AESDirect filing account.
2. This addition is only for the X12 601 format and is not available for the Customs Proprietary standard.
3. The new element is optional. If it is not sent for any shipment then all e-mails for that shipment will continue to go back to the default e-mail address for the AESDirect filing account.

Automating EDI Uploads

At the present time the only way for a user to upload a file of shipments (X12 and Customs Proprietary) is to manually access the AESDirect EDI Upload page on the AESDirect WWW site and type in or browse the file to be uploaded.

It is possible to upload EDI files without requiring direct user intervention by simulating the http transaction created by the browser. Please note, that we cannot support any attempt to automate EDI uploads, because the process will depend on software that we cannot test. Since the implementation of this type of upload will vary depending on how your software is developed, we will be limited in the amount of assistance we can provide, however we can offer some basic guidance on the process and would encourage you to implement this feature if it is of interest to you or your clients.

To upload a file automatically you will need to use an http client capable of creating a 128-bit encrypted POST transaction with multipart/form-data encoding, and passing the username and password through the http basic-authentication scheme. You can look at the source of the "EDI Upload" page to see what fields need to be passed to the script and the URL to which the transaction should be sent. Please note that you should display or parse the html returned to ensure that the upload was successful.