Amazon dropship 850 relies on order of MSG segments to determine variant

[dkanter]

In looking at the Amazon Dropship 850 EDI spec, there are two MSG segments listed in the PO1 loop (position 289). The first MSG is Item Description

And the second MSG is Gift Message

When building a guide, we cannot create a variant because there is no qualifier present. To my knowledge, sequence of repeating segments cannot/should not be relied on to interpret an X12 EDI file.

Does anyone recommend a different approach in Stedi Guides other than a single MSG segment with usage notes indicating how this is used?

[ross]

@dkanter use the advanced section of the segment indicator to change the position of the segments so that one segment is read/written first.

[dkanter]

@ross The issue here is that you cannot duplicate the MSG segment since we only use the MSG-01. The MSG-02 is technically a ID type, but you cannot use them to create a variant and then delete them without seeing an error in the guide UI.

[ross]

@dkanter Here are the specific steps

1. Mark the MSG segment as required
2. For MSG-01, Set an "Allowed code" to any value (this is temporary). This turns MSG-01 into an ID type that can be used as a discriminator to create a variant.
3. You can now duplicate MSG
4. Create any new value for the Duplicated MSG-01 Code
5. Modify one of the MSG segment's sequence number in the segment advanced second.
6. The two MSG segments are no longer considered variants.
7. You can now remove the allowed values for each MSG-01 element.

[dkanter]

@ross - this was super helpful. One thing I noticed that you need to do as well is mark the first variant to not be repeated, as otherwise the parser will make only pick up the first key and have multiple objects inside of it.