Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

User-Defined Fields

In addition to lookup and cross-reference tables, there may be data that, while not cross-referenced or converted, is required by trading partners. One example is a customer-assigned vendor number that might be required in all invoices and shipment notices sent to that customer. The vendor number could certainly be hard-coded into the appropriate XSLT stylesheets. However, it would be much more user friendly if there were a user-defined field where it could be maintained in the application's customer information subsystem. Similar information might need to be stored for each ship to location and each line item of a purchase order. For example, a UPC number might be the primary item identifier used to cross-reference against ...