I'd like to add that I'm doing the exact same thing with one of my Transportation clients with Foxpro. Foxpro is VERY well suited to the EDI tasks from the standpoint of its string speed and native data handling aspects. Unfortunately, like Ken, I've not run across an prebuilt packages for Foxpro to be used in EDI projects especially. But it's not that hard a process if you're familiar with parsing textfiles. The only difficult part is figuring out the X12/EDIFACT formatting structures being used most these days. The EDI project I did for the Transportation company originally was spec'd at 10 months but it was completed in just over 2 months. Foxpro amazed quite a few 'EDI Specialists' mired in their $3000 translators (and untold number of deadend upgrades and yearly licensing fees) that day.

Good luck on your project Jere.

- A Hilton




>Hi Jere,
>
>>
>>Are there any products that will allow an EDI interface into (and out of) VFP ?
>>
>I don't know of any package that will accomplish the total interface but all of the tools you need are contained in VFP.
>
>There are a lot of different EDI formats and standards. I am familiar with those involved with the transportation industry. In most cases my clients deal with customers through a third party. But.... the main issue is that if you understand the file layouts, you can use the VFP low level file functions to read the files and reformat the data into your VFP tables. We even have one case where customers send 'load tenders' via EDI which require a response within 15 minutes. We have a timer that polls the incoming EDI files avery 5 minutes, reads the EDI data and transforms it to VFP tables which are then displayed on a color coded screen. The client than decides whether to accept or decline the work. That response is transmitted back to the customer via EDI.
>
>Sorry to be so long winded, hope this heps.
>
>Ken