ASN reading guide
How to Read an EDI 856 Ship Notice / Manifest
Follow source boundaries, notice identity, hierarchy, qualified references, products, quantities, and logistics facts without inventing ancestry.
Read an 856 from the envelope into each HL occurrence. Confirm ST01=856, use BSN for notice identity, then resolve each HL01 identifier and HL02 parent before interpreting the level code and its owned segments.
Start with ISA, GS, ST, and BSN
The ISA declares separators and bounds the interchange; GS bounds the group; ST/SE bound the transaction. BSN reports the source notice identifier, date, time, and, where populated, hierarchy-structure code. Control numbers and SE counts should be reviewed with their matching openers.
Resolve HL identifiers before reading level meaning
HL01 identifies the current node, HL02 points to its parent, and HL03 names its level. The mapper records resolved and malformed statuses including orphan, duplicate, ambiguous, self-parent, cycle, forward-parent, depth-limit, and unresolved-ancestry cases. It never fabricates a parent chain for malformed input.
Keep each segment with its source owner
PRF can supply purchase-order context; N1 introduces a qualified party; REF and DTM remain qualifier-specific. LIN reports qualifier/value product identifiers, SN1 reports source quantities and units, MAN reports marks or container identifiers, and TD1/TD5 report packaging and carrier observations. Notes in NTE, N9/MSG, and related structures remain distinct occurrences.
Do not require one hierarchy shape
S/O/P/I is common, but S/O/T/P/I, shipment/item, order/item, and other allowed or partner-defined arrangements exist. Validate the actual parent links and level ownership. A generic structural check is not a trading-partner implementation-guide or GS1 certification.
Read, parse, or convert locally in the browser
Open the EDI Viewer for readable canonical rows, the EDI Parser for mapping inspection, or the EDI Converter for CSV, XLSX, JSON, and canonical-row XML. Use the EDI 856 field reference to interpret hierarchy, qualifier, and source-ownership columns. Source EDI content is processed in the browser and is not uploaded as conversion input.