Background – GS1 EDI
GS1 provides two complementary sets of standards for electronic business messaging, referred to as GS1 EDI: GS1 EANCOM® – for “classic” Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and GS1 XML, using a newer XML syntax. Both sets of standards provide business documents converted into a format that can be electronically exchanged between computer applications without human intervention.
In case of the GS1 XML business messages are represented as the XML instance. The structure and content of these documents is defined in GS1 XML schemas – published as the GS1 standard.
Business Message Standards (BMS)
The documents necessary to implement GS1 XML messages are published as the GS1 BMS packets.
The BMS packets from the MR 3 release can be downloaded from the following link: https://www.gs1.org/gs1-xml/latest
All the previous releases can be downloaded from https://www.gs1.org/gs1-xml/archive
Each BMS packet includes:
- BMS Introduction – a PDF file explaining what a BMS is and what does it contain
- Business Message Standard specification
- Schemas
- Sample instance files
- HTML version of the sample files
Business Message Standard specification
The BMS is a document containing specification of one or more business messages. Users must refer to this document when implementing the GS1 XML standards, since the XML schemas do not contain all the necessary definitions, due to the syntax limitations (e.g. dependencies).
Besides, the BMS documents contain definitions of all the message components, code list values as well as implementation considerations.
The BMS specification is published as a PDF file.
XML files
The BMS package contains all the XML files necessary for validating the given XML message. The XML files are contained in the following folders:
- Instance File folder - contains at least one (out of many possible) sample XML file of the message
- HTML Sample folder - contains the HTML representation of the sample XML file from the Instance File folder
- Schemas folder, with the following content:
- gs1 folder – contains two subfolders:
- ecom – includes one schema defining the eCom Common library - these are components that can be reused in any GS1 EDI business document - and a schema (or schemas) defining the business document structure
- shared – includes one schema defining the Shared Common library - these are components that can be reused in any GS1 EDI or GDSN business document
- sbdh folder – contains the Standard Business Document Header schemas
- gs1 folder – contains two subfolders: