Structural Material Manager

External Data Interface

E.J.E. Industries, Inc., established in 1980, is internationally recognized as the maker of Structural Material Manager, a software system that aids steel fabricators in managing material lists. Structural Material Manager is currently installed in well over 1,200 locations throughout North America.

One of Structural Material Manager's most powerful features is its optional External Data Interface (EDI). This module allows material lists stored in other software systems to be imported into Structural Material Manager via ASCII text files. It also allows Structural Material Manager to export its bills of material to spreadsheet, database and other types of programs that have the capability to import ASCII text files. This eliminates the need for retyping the items and makes this module a great time-saver.

Text files are often called ASCII files. ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it is pronounced "ask-ee." The ASCII standard defines the numeric representation for each alphanumeric character. For instance, 65 is the corresponding code for capital "A", and 96 is the code for lower-case "a". These codes are unimportant to you as the user; all that matters is that you know that terms "text file" and "ASCII file" mean roughly the same thing (at least in the PC world).

There are two broad categories of ASCII text files with which Structural Material Manager operates: delimited and fixed-field-width. Structural Material Manager imports bills of material either in an ASCII-delimited format (such as can be exported from Excel) or in E.J.E. Industries' published fixed-field-width format (the one that is supported by numerous CAD systems). When exporting data, Structural Material Manager always uses an ASCII-delimited format rather than a fixed-field-width format.

The term "ASCII-delimited file" simply means that the ASCII text file contains multiple fields with each being separated from the next by a character called a delimiter. For instance, the comma might be the delimiter, and it could separate fields such as Piece Mark, Quantity, Material Type, Description, Length, etc. from one another as shown in these two example lines:
1B1,2,W,10 x 54,20'-3 1/4
p1,4,PL,1/2 x 36,4'-2 9/16

The other major category of text file is the fixed-field-width file. Fixed-field-width files simply have certain data fields at certain column positions, and no delimiters or text qualifiers are necessary. For instance, the Piece Mark field might occupy the first so many columns of a fixed-field-width file, and the Quantity field might occupy the next so many columns.

Please click here for detailed information on importing and exporting ASCII-delimited files. Click here for information on importing fixed-field-width files from CAD systems.

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