CONTRL

Syntax and Service Report Message. The EDIFACT acknowledgment: it says "I have received your interchange, it is readable (or not)".

Definition

The CONTRL message, defined by UN/EDIFACT D.96A, is used "to acknowledge the receipt of an interchange or functional group, to report syntactic errors found and, optionally, to report the result of validation at various levels". It runs before any business processing: it does not say "the order is accepted", it says "the order arrived and is syntactically valid".

Three granularity levels:

1. Interchange (UCI): the full UNB/UNZ envelope.
2. Functional group (UCF): UNG/UNE subsets.
3. Message (UCM): each UNH/UNT individually.

Origin

CONTRL is one of the three founding UN/EDIFACT messages, present in version 1 published in 1987. Directory D.96A archives the specification dated 27 November 1995. The official documentation is hosted by UNECE, and a widely-cited HTML mirror is maintained by Stedi on their public EDIFACT catalog.

Example in context

The buyer sends an ORDERS, the EDI operator receives it, parses it, generates a "OK" CONTRL (UCI segment, status 7: acknowledgement) and sends it back. The GS1 EANCOM subset mandates a CONTRL within the minute for each interchange. See the message page: CONTRL D.96A.

Related terms

• UNB — the interchange header CONTRL acknowledges.
• EDI — the broader context.
• AS2 — the transport protocol that layers MDN on top of CONTRL.
• ORDRSP — the business acknowledgment, distinct from the syntactic one.