What happened¶

How does this ``run`` thing work?

When you run bots-engine, each active route is run.
Per route bots will perform all configured actions (read, translate, write):
In bots-monitor you can view the results of the run(s), the incoming edi-files, the outgoing edi-files, etc.

Detailed explanation

All actions in the picture take place in the route myfirstroute. The route contains:

an in-channel - fetches the incoming orders.

in the route is indicated that it should translate

an out-channel - transports the in-house orders to your file system.

When the incoming files have been read via the in-channel, bots starts to translate:

bots parses the incoming file, using the information in the route: editype=edifact, messagetype=edifact.

as edifact is a standard bots can find out itself that the incoming edifact file contains order messages of messagetype ORDERSD96AUNEAN008

bots looks in the translation table (see bots-monitor->Configuration->translations) to find out what to do: what mapping script to use, to what editype and messagetype should be translated. In this case the mapping script myfirstscriptordersedi2fixed translates to editype fixed, messagetype ordersfixed.

the mapping script is the heart of the translation. In the mapping script the data from the incoming message is fetched and place into the outgoing message.

A complete translation in bots needs:

Configure of the translation (bots-monitor->Configuration->Translations).

A grammar for the incoming message. A grammar describes an edi-message: the records, sequence of the records, fields in the records, field lengths etc.

A mapping script. The mapping script gets data from the incoming message and puts it in the outgoing message. A mapping script is a Python script. You do not need to be proficient in Python to do this; only the basics of Python are used. And Python is a relatively easy computer language. There are a lot of good examples of mapping scripts in the plugins.

A grammar for the outgoing message.