XML::Edifact - an approach towards XML/EDI as a prototype in perl: Installation

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## 3. Installation

I've included my modified documents, so others can be able to rebuild the DBM files. You may need a Unix like system because of newline conventions.

> `

>             $ perl Makefile.PL

>             I know I should check for those 99 possible places, but I prefer to ask :-)

>             URL for public documents [http://localhost/xml-edifact]
>             Directory on this system [/usr/local/apache/htdocs/xml-edifact]

>             Writing Makefile for XML::Edifact

>             $ make

> `

`perl perl Makefile.PL` will first ask two questions. The reason is that XML::Edifact wants to install his document type definition on a web server to allow validation XML parser to grep the DTD.

If you dont have a web server, anwer "." as the URL and "/tmp/xml-edifact" as a directoryname. You may change those decissions later by reperling the Makefile.PL, or by editing the XML::Edifact::Config module in your SITE_PERL.

Make will take a while and you hopefully have a working database. This database covers the 96b version of the UN/EDIFACT batch directory and will become installed as XML::Edifact::d96b later.

> `

>             $ make test

> `

The regression test will translate any .edi file found in the examples directory to xml and translate the xml back to EDIFACT. The result should not change.

> `

>             $ make install

> `

This will install the XML::Edifact module the D96B batch directory, various files for the URL and two scripts: `edi2xml` and `xml2edi`

You can now try own UN/EDIFACT files. I really want to know how your EDI messages look like, do they break anything, what about your code list extension, ...

Testing different real examples should show some bugs, I hav'nt thought about. Think about the `O'Reilly` invoice or the `Dubbel:Test` and you should catch the clue. I've tried to implement the `UNA` right, but this may need some additional debugging. Take a look at the difference between the editeur.edi file from Frankfurt and the Springer message. The last one is using newline as a 9th character in UNA, so its nearly human readable.

A last word - I hope this complex installlation will work on most Unix look likes, but I'm quite sure that it'll break on Windows and Mac. If you have such a system, and problems during installation, drop me a mail. You are granted my help, as I need your help to make the installation portabel across different platforms.

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