I have been doing EDI for one of my clients for about 5 years. We now have 32 differnet trading partners (mostly very large retail chains).

The app is still in Foxpro DOS 2.6, but will move to VFP soon. We use Sterling Commerce's GENTRAN PC for the heavy lifting in EDI.

Incoming edi documents are translated to text files by Gentran. My Foxpro program parses them into orders. After the orders are processed, my program produces text files that import into Gentran to become ship notices and invoices.

While you probably can code this directly from the raw EDI, I would not recommend it. A very few people do FTP transfer, but most insist on using a VAN (value added network) like Steling or Advantis. Every incoming document must be acknowledged immediately with a 997.

As you gather from other replies, calling EDI a standard ranks right up there with the check being in the mail. Setting it up is like being pecked to death by ducks, but once in place it works very smoothly and on days when we recieve 1000 purchase orders by EDI, 30 minutes of processing to produce orders sure beats days of data entry from paper.

Potter Orr