Is anyone seriously using the Base EDI Adapter in a 'live' environment with EDIFACT messages? Is it as slow, unstable and flaky as it appears to be in 'development'? Given that the Base EDI Adapter appears to be a cut-down version of Covast: * Is the full Covast product signficantly more professional and stable than the Base EDI Adapter? * Is it any easier to use? * Is it actually worth the cost (which almost doubles the total cost of a BTS implementation)? I'm seriously disappointed with the Base EDI Adapter. Even with BTS 2004 SP1 it appears to be poorly constructed and unstable. After spending just a couple of days using it I have run into plenty of issues that seem to show lack of thorough testing and some very dubious design. E.g: * If the folder on a single EDI Adapter send-port doesn't exist (e.g. spelled just slightly wrong) then the EDI adapter will just stop functioning. No event-log messages. You have to set the trace options on the adapter to discover this (and don't just use the default file path - that doesn't seem to work). I.e. you can break ALL edi operations with a single mistake. * First Schema validation for an INVOIC D95B took over 15 minutes (Pentium IV 3.2Ghz HT, 1Gb memory). I thought it had died. * Don't interrupt the schema validation or you will find your database 'locked'. Restarting will cause all subsequent EDI Adapter operations to fail. Need to rebuild the live.eif file with the compeif.exe in order to get it working again. * Don't copy a schema, change the standards directory version (e.g. d96b) and attempt to validate it - without ensuring that the EDICodeList.mdb has an appropriate table with the new dieectory version. This will cause 40-50 message boxes to pop up with the same nonsensical message about being unable to connect to something using an ODBC/Access driver. This will also cause the Database 'tree' to become corrupted. The consequences of this is that the EDI Adapter will stop functioning - and an event-log message saying that the eif file is missing. * No, compeif.exe will not just re-create the eif file. Compeif will run up to some point (84% in my case) and then just die. No error message, nothing. The trace file will possibly show something - but don't guarantee it. * Solution to a corrupt database tree appears to be to drop all of the tables in BizTalkEDIDb and recreate them (run the EDI.sql and then the GRANTS.sql in the Adapter\Bin\Config directory - also run the updateEDI.sql from the SP1 install directory). Re-run compeif, runs quickly to 100%. Re-Start EDI Adapter. * Modified an existing schema (copy to a new project first). Delete some of the un-needed segments (E.g. a looping segment group). Try validate the schema. DevEnv says: "Validate Schema succeeded". EDI Adapter fails again. (EIF File gone again, compeif fails again - this time at 48%). Drop Tables etc. (again). Seems that deleting the group hasn't cleaned everything from the schema. The elements defining the group segment are still in the xsd file. I have spent more time Googling and KB'ing for answers to problems than I have on actual testing. The Base EDI Adaptor looks to me like a very bad beta of a 0.9 version of something. Does anyone have anything positive to report on this?
My company had a similar difficult experience implementing the base EDI adapter for a client, although we were using X-12. The deployment alone took me several weeks of full time work, and many hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support. Our current policy is not to do EDI unless the customer buys the Covast product. Another thing that I remember about development is that it was impossible to map anything to a some nodes in a destination 850 schema, it always caused an error. And it definitely wasn't our fault, doing the same thing using Covast worked great. I didn't get to use the Covast adapter all the way through to deployment (a project under development got cancelled), but we didn't have any trouble with it as far as we went. There is a learning curve, since a lot of development takes place with Covast's proprietary tool. Good luck, Steve "Kevin Charleston" wrote in message news:%23a%23lM4EaGHA.1560@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl... > Is anyone seriously using the Base EDI Adapter in a 'live' environment > with EDIFACT messages? > Is it as slow, unstable and flaky as it appears to be in 'development'? >
