Today we've improved our Guidelines feature to provide full support for X12 composite elements.

While our users have always had the ability to write guidelines on component elements – the simple data elements making up an X12 composite element – until now, the requirements of that parent composite element couldn't be specified.

As of today, you'll see a separate entry in the Guidelines builder for composite elements, allowing you to indicate whether or not a composite element is mandatory, as well as write syntax notes on that composite element indicating which of its component elements have relational conditions between them.

Formerly, if you marked a component element as 'mandatory', a transaction would always fail validation if that component element wasn't present. Now, that transaction will still fail validation, but only if the parent composite element is also mandatory, or other component elements are present. Said another way – if a composite element is optional, a missing mandatory component element will only cause a validation error if at least some portion of that composite element is being sent.

We've been careful to make this change in a way that ensures that your existing guidelines will still be evaluated in exactly the same way that they always have been. If you'd like to take advantage of the new functionality with your existing guidelines, you can do so simply by copying your published guideline to a new draft, making the needed changes, and then publishing the new version.

We're excited to announce a new feature today – the ability to track and visualize sequences of transactions that belong together in a business process.

Groups of related transactions are automatically created and maintained as transactions are processed by Orderful. As a first step, we've added the Retail Workflow, which groups transactions of the following types by their associated Purchase Order number:

• 850 Purchase Order
• 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment
• 856 Shipment Notice Manifest
• 860 Purchase Order Change Request Buyer Initiated
• 865 Purchase Order Change Acknowledgement
• 810 Invoice

When you click on a transaction in the Retail Workflow, our updated Transaction Details page will now show you all of its related transactions from that workflow:

Filter settings on Transactions, Relationships, and Guidelines are now automatically persisted and restored locally. You can now use other Orderful features knowing that your filters will still be there when you're back.

We've improved the Turnaround rule writing experience. By pulling in your reference Transaction and displaying them side-by-side with your currently selected segments, you can now visually select the paths you want matched.

In order to provide you and your system with the most accurate data, we introduced a new optional validation step to our platform. Now, you’re able to add an “inbound guideline” to your account. This guideline is then used to validate all your incoming transactions of a certain transaction type, similar to how that’s already being done to transactions you’re sending to your trading partners.

If any transaction reaches your Orderful account and it doesn’t meet your guideline for that transaction type, the transaction will be marked “Invalid” and held in your account. You can then write rules to fix that transaction and new ones of that type going forward. Once the transaction becomes “Valid”, it will be automatically posted to your system.

If you’re looking to set up such an inbound guideline, please contact us and we’ll help you through the process.

We've got a really exciting new feature to announce – support for X12 relational conditions, i.e. Syntax Notes!

Under the X12 specification, whether or not a certain data element should be sent as part of a given segment often depends on whether other related data elements are sent alongside it. For example, if one data element contains a qualifier code specifying the type of data sent in another element, then it's often the case that you need to send either both of those elements together, or neither of them, otherwise your X12 message will be invalid.

With our new Syntax Notes feature, you're now able to specify those conditions when writing your guideline, and we'll take those conditions into account when validating transactions.

Here's an example of adding a Syntax Note to a segment:

We know it can be a lot of work adding all your trading partner's requirements when building a guideline, and our syntax notes feature just adds to that, so we've snuck in one more new feature with this release – improved pre-population of X12 default values!

What that means is that when you add a new segment to your guideline, the syntax notes & maximum use values specified by the X12 standard will be pre-filled for you, and any elements which are always mandatory in that segment, together with their data types & lengths, will be automatically added as well. We think you'll now find that once you've added all the needed loops & segments to your guideline, your work is very nearly complete.

We've got a new feature to announce today – the ability to upload a PDF of your guidelines, accessible by both your organization and your trading partners.

We've been working hard here at Orderful on our Guidelines feature, and we've made a lot of improvements over the past couple months to make guideline entry easier and faster than ever. That said, we understand that mistakes do happen when entering data, and we've heard the request that it'd be nice to have an easy way to reference the original PDF guideline to verify that the guideline was entered correctly and that transactions are being validated as expected.

That's now a possibility with our new PDF guideline upload feature, live in our app as of this morning. You'll have the opportunity to upload your PDF at the time of either creating a new guideline or viewing an existing one. Also, when your trading partners see that one of their transactions has failed validation, they'll also have the opportunity to click through to your guideline and download the original PDF.

See it in action:

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback, so reach out to us anytime and let us know how you like it!

Summary

We've made several changes to the editor used to create or edit Guidelines to make things clearer and easier to use:

• When creating a new guideline, if the selected transaction type already has an existing draft guideline, you’ll be warned about that right up front and won’t be able to continue. Previously, you wouldn’t find out about that until you’ve already spent the time setting up your guideline structure.

• The ISA & GS segments, as well as transaction sets & the first segment of any selected loop are now ‘locked’ - i.e. they can’t be deselected.

• Checking a loop will automatically check any of its contents which are mandatory under the X12 spec (although they can still be deselected, with the exception of the first segment in the loop).

• Unchecking a loop will automatically uncheck all of its descendants too. This eliminates the possibility of creating an invalid guideline structure in the structure editor, which previously would prevent the user from saving the structure.

• The ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ buttons to add and remove variants are now swapped - only the bottom-most variant has the ‘minus’, while all others have the ‘plus’.

• When attempting to edit the structure of a guideline, if you have existing unsaved changes, you are warned about that before you’re able to edit the structure. Previously, you wouldn’t be warned until after you had already made your structure changes.

Summary

We've made some improvements to viewing and editing an invalid Transaction for your experience. If a Transaction is invalid because it doesn't meet your Trading Partner's guidelines, you can now access them directly by clicking on "View Guideline" button or by clicking the "View in Guideline" icon in an error card!

Summary

We're excited to announce support for Webhook destinations. Webhooks will allow us to push Transactions directly to your endpoint when they are received in Orderful.

How To Create a Webhook

Webhooks can be created via the UI by navigating to the Settings tab in the top right of the navigation bar.

Then click on Settings.

From here, you may enter the URL that you would like to receive the transaction_created webhook event for.

After you save the URL, we will provide you with your Secret Key that you can use to verify that we are the sender of the requests.

See the Webhooks guide for more details.