Providing Identifying Information

This is probably more of a concern for electronic commerce applications than for application integration, but it may be an issue there too depending on the situation. In the EDI world, most EDI management systems rely on one or a few specific fields in an outbound document to look up the EDI-related details about the trading partner. This is usually a customer or vendor number and is used as a key to the trading partner setup in the EDI system.

Although the world of e-commerce using XML is still evolving, things may be slightly different in that world than they have been in the EDI world. There's a tendency among utilities that move XML around to just consider documents as payload and not look inside them. This is unlike EDI management systems that must examine the application data in order to transform it. The strategy you will have to follow will depend on the particular methods or systems used for data transport. The bottom line is that you may have requirements for providing identifying information within a document or by some external means such as specific file names, locations, or key values that are passed in method calls.