X12 Standards and Segment/Loop Ordering

Why oh why did the X12 committee for health care define some standards that allow some of the segments and/or loops in an X12 document to appear in any order?  The doc specs define the order in which all these things must appear in an EDI file, but some rare segments/loops have the same relative position, meaning that those particular items can actually appear in any order relative to each other in an X12 file (e.g. in the 4010 837P see the 2420{C,D,E,F} loops).

Darn that makes it hard to parse into XML and validate.  I’m guessing (just a WAG here) that about 99% of the X12 standard definition for any given document defines a well structured order.  What was X12 thinking when they allowed so few of these things to be randomly ordered amongst themselves?  That is just nuts.

If there is a valid rationale for that I’d honestly like to hear it.  I’ve spent the last two days cursing it…..

I Hate Crystal Reports

The company I work for began using Crystal Reports some years back, and not being a “report writer” I didn’t care too much at the time.  Now, of course, that inattention is biting me in the backside because I have inherited the task of redesigning a couple of those reports.  That alone should be pretty humbling since I am a “software engineer”, not a danged “report writer”.  These reports have a fairly intricate amount of line drawing in them to create a “form” look for the generated report which undoubtedly causes some of the headaches with redesigning these.

I can proudly state that I am pretty inexperienced with Crystal Reports (or any other reporting software) so perhaps I am bringing some of this upon myself, but this has to be the most damnably frustrating piece of …. software …. I have ever used.  There are SO many things that can go wrong.  Fonts can get you (oh, it will “work”, but may not look ANYTHING like you designed).  Permissions can get you (sometimes to system folders).  Disk space free in unexpected places can get you.  Bad reporting fields can get you, which is okay but you think it would tell you which one!!!  HA!!!  If only!  And don’t you go changing any of the default behaviors for a report.  That’s a certain death wish.

You have to know something of redistributing the right runtime version of Crystal Reports on the client machine, and of course they have “upgraded” Crystal Reports like they were changing underwear.  Is it v8?  v9?  v10?  vX?  Visual Studio 2003?  Visual Studio 2005?  Dog crap?  (Yes, it IS the latter!).  Have you installed service packs?  Hotfixes?  The list goes on and on and on.

With all the bells and whistles this thing claims to have you think it would at least be WYSIWYG, but regrettably it is not.  Design to your hearts content, then see the deployment have not so subtle and catastrophic affects on the output.  It can easily make a report you spent weeks perfecting look like some piece of garbage somebody threw together in an afternoon.

I read a blog entry recently where some sap claimed the inclusion of Crystal Reports into Visual Studio had “made the programmers life so much simpler”….. I’ll bet the poor sucker has not tried to deploy that sumbuck to another computer!

By the way, did I mention I hate Crystal Reports?