Getting Started with Logic Apps

Introduction
Any organisation which needs to do Business to Business communication using EDI Standards (EDI X12, EDIFACT, TRADACOMS etc) need to have some EDI System/Tool/Processor/Translator which does understand EDI standards and capable of receiving and sending the EDI messages.

In following post I have explained the basics of EDI and EDI X12 standards

And before starting the communication the business partners decide on how communication will be (transport protocol), what data format will be used , whether Acknowledgement is required etc etc and all this becomes the part of Agreement between them.

Following is high level picture of B2B EDI communication

When a EDI document is to be sent the Partner 1 EDI system refers to Agreement and creates the documents as per the instructions in it.

When a EDI document is to be received by the Partner 2, it's EDI system refers to Agreement to Validate the incoming document and to check if Acknowledgement - Technical(TA1)/Functional(997/999) is to be created or not.

Let’s see how we can enable EDI communication with Logic Apps

Logic Apps and EDI together

Earlier it was BizTalk from Microsoft which has all capabilities around Enterprise Application Integration(EAI) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)(which is server product) but with the cloud shift where everything is desired as service, Microsoft provided Logic Apps to cater the integration needs for cloud users and it is continuously getting matured (most of BizTalk capabilities already added).

Scenario

Say there is a company Techfindings and it wants to receive EDI X12 850 from its business partner and after getting it, it needs to convert it XML Purchase Order format which is expected by it's inhouse application for further processing.Inhouse application wants the file to be placed in a Blob Container.

And the business partner don't need any acknowledgement.

So we need to create a solution which will accept EDI X12 850 message and convert it to XML Purchase Order and forward it to Blob location for Inhouse application.

Steps in creating solution

1. Create Integration Account

On Azure portal, select All services and search for "integration account" as your filter, and select Integration Account

Give Name , select subscription and resource group. Under Pricing Tier as Free and location where it is to be kept.

Note: Use same location when you create Logic App as integration accounts, must exist in the same region as your logic apps.

2. Create/obtain the schemas

If you don't have BizTalk dev machine then you would need Visual Studio 2015 to create/edit the schemas and maps.

You can download community edition from - https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/older-downloads/

Also you will have to add following extension - Microsoft Azure Logic Apps Enterprise Integration Tools for Visual Studio 2015 2.0

Note: No extension available in later version above 2015, as the extension is borrowed from BizTalk 2016.Latest release of BizTalk 2020 happened recently but yet extension is not rolled out by Microsoft.

Above is XML Order Schema and below is the XML representation of EDI X12 850 schema.

EDI Schemas can be downloaded from - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39087

3. Create map

As we need to produce Order XML select EDI X12 850 as source and XML Order as destination schema

Once mapping is done, we need to get the xslt file , for that right click on map file -->Select Debug and in output window you can see the xslt path

make note of path where xslt is stored,as it is this which is to be uploaded to integration account (.btm file is not supported).

Read - The provided map definition is not valid

Following is the xslt

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:var="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/var" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl var s0" version="1.0" xmlns:ns0="http://EDIToXMLDemo.XML_Orders" xmlns:s0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/EDI/X12/2006">

<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="xml" version="1.0" />

<xsl:template match="/">

<xsl:apply-templates select="/s0:X12_00504_850" />

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="/s0:X12_00504_850">

<ns0:Orders>

<Order>

<xsl:value-of select="s0:BEG/BEG03/text()" />

</PONumber>

<xsl:value-of select="s0:BEG/BEG05/text()" />

</PODate>

</Header>

<xsl:for-each select="s0:PO1Loop1">

<xsl:if test="s0:PO1/PO071">

<xsl:value-of select="s0:PO1/PO071/text()" />

</ItemId>

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test="s0:PO1/PO072">

<xsl:value-of select="s0:PO1/PO072/text()" />

</Quantity>

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test="s0:PO1/PO074">

<xsl:value-of select="s0:PO1/PO074/text()" />

</UnitPrice>

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test="s0:PO1/PO077">

<xsl:value-of select="s0:PO1/PO077/text()" />

</ItemDescription>

</xsl:if>

</LineItems>

</xsl:for-each>

</Order>

</ns0:Orders>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

4. Add schemas and map to Integration Account

Go to the integration account created earlier in step1 and select the Schemas tiles and click on add button.

Give name and browse to schema path and select the schemas, below is how it should look

Read related error - Selected file must be between 1 and 2097152 bytes

Go to the integration account created earlier in step1 and select the Maps tiles and click on add button.

Give name and browse to xslt path(saved in step 3) and below is how it should look

5. Add Partners

Go to the integration account created earlier in step1 and select the Partners tiles and click on add button.

The partner which represents your organization is known as host partner -Techfindings is identity value given which is mutually defined thus qualifier is ZZ and the second partner is known as the guest partner - EDIPartner is identity value given which is mutually defined thus qualifier is ZZ. The guest partner can be another company, or even a department within your own organization.

6. Add Agreement

Go to the integration account created earlier in step1 and select the Agreement tiles and click on add button.

You and your trading partner mutually decide about how the communication has to be done i.e. protocol or transport-specific. In our scenario its X12 protocol based communication.

For transport specific B2B communication read - Getting Started with Logic Apps - AS2

Here as we are going to receive EDI document, so Receive settings of the agreement has to be defined.

Receive Settings is organized into these sections:

1. Identifiers -we have not use any Identifier
2. Acknowledgment - we have not chosen any acknowledgement as we don't need it (Partner doesn't want)
3. Schemas - we have selected 00504 as version, 850 as Transaction type and EDI_850 as schema

Note: In case where some other EDI documents is to be from same Partner, then we need to select Schema and Envelope for that as well . In the image below you can see another edi document configured i.e. EDI_315

4.Envelopes - Standard Identifier and default values for GS
5.Character Sets and Separators - UTF 8
6.Control Numbers - Control numbers are supposed to be unqiue for each request. Select the desired one from below

Disallow Interchange Control Number duplicates - Stops duplicate interchanges. Checks the interchange control number (ISA13) for the received interchange control number. If a match is detected, within the specified number of days
Disallow Group control number duplicates - Stops interchanges with duplicate group control numbers.

Disallow Transaction set control number duplicates - Stop interchanges
number is added when edi doc leaves, thus a range is to be defined, here it is starting from 1 till 999999999
7.Validation - You can configure the level of validation needed, have kept default

8.Internal Settings - Here you specify how to process the interchange batch, what to do if Validation fails

Check following Microsoft article for more details about Agreement Settings - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-enterprise-integration-x12#configure-how-your-agreement-sends-messages

7. Create Logic App and link Integration Account

Create logic app, add http trigger and save it. Go to workflow settings and link the integration account created in step 1

Note: The way to receive EDI document can vary based on devlopment strategy, like FTP or Blob location can also be used

8. Design the logic App

First step is to add Http request followed by Decode X12 message

Decode X12 message action needs inputs from integration account i.e., schemas, maps and agreement. Thus we need to create a connection to Integration Account. Provide Name, select the Integration account and click on Create.

create connection to Integration account

And then provide it the message received by the trigger (http request)

Next is add For each action and Provide it output of above step - goodmessages followed by Transform XML action

Against content add following expression -- xml(base64ToBinary(item()?['Payload']))

Against map select EDI850_toXMLOrder

Last step is to add Create Blob action. Before using this action, you need to create a storage account and container. See following - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-quickstart-blobs-portal

Create connection to blob and then select the location, give the name to the file/blob to be created and content would be whatever above map gives us

Below is the final Logic app

The logic app receives EDI 850 messager over http, then it Decodes EDI X12 message and then transforms it in xml Order with help of Transform XML action and finally places the converted file in blob container.

Testing

Below is EDI X12 850 test input posted using ARC to logic app

and xml file was created in blob container

And below is what it has

How it Works

The logic app receives EDI 850 messager over http, then it moves to Decode X12 message action and it is here where all the magic happens.

It first reads the identities from the interchange and goes for searching an Agreement from the Integration Account to which we had created a connection to.

With reference to found Agreement it validates if all is as expected i.e. if edi version is correct or not, are the delimiters in adherence to agreement, are values as per data type/restrictions or not etc.

It creates payload as per the option choosen in Internal settings(Internal batch Processing), the payload is xml representation of edi file with root node added to it and it also generates acknowledgement if agreement says so.

The valid documents are added in goodMessages(array of valid documents) else in badMessages(array of invalid documents).

To process the valid documents we need to go through each item in goodMessages thus ForEach action is used.

The payload created by Decode X12 message action is base64 encoded so we

need to decode it first and as map expects xml representation of the ST document so it is to be converted

into xml. Thus following expression is used in Transform XML action

xml(base64ToBinary(item()?['Payload']))

And finally the transformed xml is placed on the blob location.

In this post we covered the fundamentals of B2B EDI communication and walkthrough the steps on how to make it cloud based using Logic Apps and Enterprise Integration pack.