Status

MESSAGE TYPE: CONTRL
REFERENCE DIRECTORY: D.01B
EANCOM® SUBSET VERSION: 004

Definition

A Syntax and Service Report message is a message syntactically acknowledging, or rejecting with error indication, a received interchange, or message.

Principles

A sender of an EDIFACT interchange can in the UNB segment, using data element 0031, ‘Acknowledgement request’, request a response from the receiver indicating receipt of the interchange, and if necessary, whether the syntax of all contained segments is correct and supported by the recipient.

The information transmitted in the link is the following:

1. acknowledge or reject the interchange or message and list any errors contained therein.
2. acknowledge only the receipt. This requires that the UNB, UNZ and the UNA if used, be checked.

The EANCOM® CONTRL message will not be used to report on functional groups. The use of functional groups within EANCOM® is not a recommended practice.

The CONTRL message is used to report on the syntax level of an interchange not the business information/data content contained. To acknowlegde errors made during the processing within the application see APERAK message.

A recipient may choose to acknowledge syntactical errors which are deemed to be non-fatal by the recipient, e.g. data element exceeding the maximum length.

The CONTRL message will be generated by the recipient of another message. The application which carries out the syntax check may be a third party acting on behalf of the message recipient, e.g. a value added network. When this function is carried out by a third party, the third party should not stop progress of the message to its destination, but should report results to the message recipient according to procedures agreed between the recipient and the third party. The message sender and the message recipient always retain the responsibility for the business use of the CONTRL message.

A CONTRL message shall only be generated when the recipient of the message supports the receipt of a CONTRL message. This agreement would normally be detailed in the interchange agreement.

A CONTRL message must always be sent as a separate interchange.

A CONTRL message may only ever report the action taken for one interchange. It may not refer to several, or parts of several interchanges.

The CONTRL message may acknowledge or reject a complete interchange without referencing messages contained within it.

Additional Notes

Relationship between CONTRL and original interchange

A maximum of two CONTRL messages may be sent in response to a received interchange, an optional acknowledgement of receipt of the interchange, and/or, a report on the results of the syntax check of the interchange. The second type of CONTRL message must be sent if a request for acknowledgement is indicated in the original interchange UNB segment.

The CONTRL message is based on four segments each of which refers to a particular area in the original interchange:

Each of the above four CONTRL segments contains a data element indicating the action taken and if required the error being reported.

When acknowledging only the receipt of an interchange segment groups 1 (maximum 1 per message) shall not be used.

Use of Action Codes

The action, either acknowledgement or rejection, is indicated by a code in the UCI and/or UCM segments. The codes allocated to the 'Syntax error, coded', data element 0085, are contained in the code list for this data element (Part III of this manual).

When referencing a level, a segment from the referenced level must be contained in the CONTRL message. When referencing lower levels, all levels above the lower levels must be acknowledged.

Action code 4 and 7 are only used in CONTRL messages reporting the action after a complete check of the interchange. Action code 8 is only used to acknowledge receipt of the interchange.

Syntactical Error Reporting

Errors may be reported for all levels in an interchange using the CONTRL message. The position and nature of the error may be indicated.

The UCI and UCM segments may only report one error per level referenced. If more than one error is detected within a level, the receiver of the interchange may choose to either indicate one of the identified errors or all errors. Reporting of several errors in an interchange is achieved through the use of the relevant group repeated for each error level. Several CONTRL messages shall not be sent to report several errors.

It is recommended that errors, and their positions, should be identified as precisely as possible. Use of more general error codes in place of more precise ones is strongly discouraged. Identification of the precise location of an error will usually require access to the interchange in the format in which it was transferred.

Errors in copied Data Elements

The CONTRL message contains several mandatory data elements which are copied from the original interchange, e.g. in the UCM segment data elements 0062 through 0057 inclusive are copied from the UNH segment. If the data element in the original interchange is missing or syntactically invalid then a syntactically valid CONTRL message can not be generated. If the trading parties have not agreed to allow syntactically incorrect data in the CONTRL message then the error must be reported through means other than the CONTRL message.

Acknowledgement of a CONTRL message

No CONTRL, or other message types in UN/EDIFACT, shall be sent in response to a received CONTRL message. Errors in received CONTRL messages must be reported by other means.

Support of the CONTRL message type

Parties requesting acknowledgement by means of the 'Acknowledgement request' data element in the UNB segment must support the receipt of the CONTRL message type. Requirements for the submission and receipt of the CONTRL message should be agreed between trading parties.

All parties supporting the receipt or submission of the CONTRL message must be able to check all parts of the interchange in the case of the sender, and, be able to understand all information (and report errors) at all reporting levels in the case of the receiver.

Terms and definitions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT implies that the recipient of the interchange:

- has received the acknowledged part of the interchange, and
- has checked that there are no fatal syntactic errors in the acknowledged part that prevents further processing of it, and
- has checked that all received service segments in the acknowledged part are semantically correct (if no errors were reported), and
- will comply with the actions requested in the service segments, and
- has accepted liability for notifying the sender by other means than sending a CONTRL message if any syntactic or semantic errors as described above are later detected in the relevant part, or the part can not be processed for some other reason after the part has been acknowledged in a submitted CONTRL message,
- has taken reasonable precautions in order to ensure that such errors are detected and that the sender is notified.


REJECTION implies that the recipient of the subject interchange:

- can not acknowledge the interchange or relevant part of it for reasons indicated in the CONTRL message, and
- will not take any further action on business information contained in the rejected part of the interchange.


REPORTING LEVEL is a segment in CONTRL in which reporting of a corresponding referenced level takes place. The reporting levels are UCI, UCM, UCS and UCD.


REFERENCED LEVEL - the structure of the CONTRL message is based on four segments (UCI, UCD, UCS and UCM) that contain a reference to a part of the interchange. The parts of the interchange are detailed in Additional Notes, section 1 above.