Acord Pcs XML Ifx Deviations

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ACORD XML BUSINESS MESSAGESPECIFICATION FOR P&C INSURANCE

AND SURETY

VERSION 1.0.0 DEVIATIONS FROM IFX 1.0.1

07/31/2001

ACORD CorporationOne Blue Hill Plaza

P.O. Box 152915 th Floor Pearl River, NY 10965-8529

© 2000 – 2001 ACORD CORPORATIONALL RIGHTS RESERVED



Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................................1

1.1 G OVERNING PRINCIPLES ...............................................................................................................................................1

2 DEFINITION OF TERMS.............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ...... ....1

3 DATA TYPE DEFINITIONS....................... .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ...........1

4 DOCUMENTATION AND NAMING CONVENTIONS..................... .............. .............. ............... ............ ..... ..... ...2

5 FRAMEWORK SPECIFICATION.............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ......... .2

5.1 I NTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................................................25.2 F RAMEWORK .............................................................................................................................................................35.3 C OMMON FRAMEWORK AGGREGATES .............................................................................................................................35.4 ACORD D OCUMENT .................................................................................................................................................35.5 A UTHENTICATION .......................................................................................................................................................45.6 S ERVICE WRAPPERS ....................................................................................................................................................4

6 TRANSPORT AND PACKAGING SPECIFICATION................. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ....4

7 XML FORMAT SPECIFICATION............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ...... ...... ...... ......4

© 2000 – 2001 ACORD CORPORATIONALL RIGHTS RESERVED



ACORD XML BUSINESS MESSAGE SPECIFICATION FOR P&C INSURANCE AND SURETY VERSION 1.0.0IDEVIATIONS FROM IFX 1.0.1

1 INTRODUCTION

The ACORD Business Message Specification for Property & Casualty and Surety is based on the InteractiveFinancial Exchange (IFX) Business Message Specification v 1.0.1 as a result of a cooperative relationshipbetween ACORD and IFX Forum ( www.ifxforum.org ). Most of the business message structure, data types, anddocumentation conventions were borrowed from the IFX Specification. In some areas, ACORD has adopted theexact IFX semantics and in other areas has enhanced it based on the needs of the Insurance Industry.

The purpose of this document is to specify the areas where ACORD has deviated from the borrowed IFXmaterials (mainly the IFX Framework). Only the sections specifically borrowed from IFX are mentioned in thisdocument. The sections that describe the ACORD Business messages and code lists are unique to ACORDand do not contain IFX copyrighted material.

1.1 Governing Principles

ACORD borrowed and followed all of the governing principles listed in this section. Although the use of XMLattributes was avoided, it was decided that leveraging them for transient identifier and identifier referencing wasvalid. The relevant guiding principle was extended to reflect the deviation.

2 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Many of the definitions of terms in this section were borrowed from the IFX specification while others wereadded. Of those definitions borrowed from IFX, none deviated from the IFX definition. Items added thatrepresent extensions to IFX are:

• Attachment

• Business Message (Submit)

• Entity

• Framework

• Transaction

• Transport

3 DATA TYPE DEFINITIONS

In this section, ACORD documents several data types borrowed from IFX exactly as they appear in the IFXspecification. Additionally, ACORD documents three new types and modifies three existing types.

1© 2000 – 2001 ACORD CORPORATION

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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The modified types are:

• Boolean – The Boolean type is the same in ACORD as IFX except that a sentence was added to theACORD definition stating that an optional element of type Boolean is implied to be not answered if it isabsent. In IFX, Boolean types default to False if absent.

• Currency – Moved to the Entity section of the specification. The content of the currency structure waschanged and a <ConversionRate> aggregate was added that can be referenced from any element of type Currency.

• Enum - A requirement to identify the owner of a particular code list lead to the creation of a <CodeList>aggregate containing relevant code list owner information that can be referenced from any element of type Enum.

The new types are:

• Transient Unique Identifiers - The ACORD definition of the ID concept

•

Identifier Reference – The ACORD definition of the IDREF concept• Multiple Identifier References - The ACORD definition of the IDREFS concept

4 DOCUMENTATION AND NAMING CONVENTIONS

Each section in this chapter we borrowed from the IFX exactly as they appear in the IFX Specification with thefollowing exceptions:

• In the section on Naming Rules ACORD specifies the naming convention of a business message to beLOB, Object, Property, Method, Direction order; e.g., <PersAutoPolicyAddRq>.

•

ACORD specifies an underscore as a prefix delimiter for custom elements as opposed to the IFX useof the colon.

5 FRAMEWORK SPECIFICATION

5.1 Introduction

The ACORD Framework specification is the recommended method for sending and receiving ACORD businessmessages. It is based on the Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) specification developed and managed by IFXForum ( www.ifxforum.org ). In some areas, ACORD has adopted the exact IFX semantics and in other areashas enhanced it based on the needs of the Insurance Industry.

• ACORD borrowed the same organization (Document, Authentication, Service) but does not consider business messages part of the Framework rather a set of messages that can me utilized in anyFramework.


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• ACORD uses the term Transaction to describe a Request/Response pair where IFX avoids the use of that term.

• ACORD considers the Base Service part of the Framework while the other services are not.

• ACORD naming conventions required that all Enum types end with “Cd’ (Code) so several IFXFramework tag names were renamed.

5.2 Framework

In this section, the entire IFX framework for Property and Casualty Insurance and Surety is defined by ACORDusing a different documentation style by using Entities in a manor consistent with the ACORD DTD. The overallstructure of the IFX Framework is the same with several ACORD extensions:

• A <SupressNotificationInd> element was added to the (root) document aggregate for the purpose of allowing a client to request suppression of asynchronous response notifications which the server maysend as <PendingResponseInfo> aggregates.

• A minimal Base Service was added that serves the same purpose as the IFX Base Service but omitsmost of the Customer messages. The IFX Service Profile messages <SvcProfInqRq and<SvcProfInqRs> are included here along with ACORD-Defined messages for requesting pendingresponses called <PendingResponseInqRq> and <PendingResponseInqRq>.

• An Extensions Service was added for the purpose of allowing Insurers to define unique extensions andrules in-band in order to influence the behavior of client applications.

• An Insurance Service was added containing Property and Casualty messages for Personal, SmallCommercial, and Large Commercial Lines of Business.

• A Surety Service was added containing messages for Bond Requests and Report of Execution.

• The IFX Signon messages were included but the <SignonMagPIN> option was omitted.

5.3 Common Framework Aggregates

This section was added to define aggregates that are used throughout the Framework. The following deviationsfrom IFX are noted:

• The <PendingResponseInfo> aggregate is an ACORD-specific aggregate used in asynchronousresponse processing.

• The <Status> aggregate is only used in the Framework for Error conditions and the <Severity> elementwas removed. A new <MsgStatus> aggregate was defined for reporting statuses on various conditionsat the message level.

5.4 ACORD Document

ACORD borrowed the Document concept from IFX but modified the content model and decided to name theroot tag <ACORD>.


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5.5 Authentication

ACORD borrowed the entire Authentication process from IFX and only modified it slightly:

• An optional <SuppressEcho> element was borrowed from IFX 1.1.0 and added to the end of the

<SignonRq> aggregate.• <CryptPswd> and <CryptType> were changed to <EncryptionPswd> and <EncryptionTypeCd>.

5.6 Service Wrappers

IFX Service Wrappers are used by ACORD exactly as they are defined in the IFX Specification. Since the BaseService is considered part of the Framework, the IFX Service Profile messages and <xxxSvcProfInfo>aggregates for each ACORD-Defined Service are found in this section.

• The aggregates defined in the <SvcProfInqRq> and <SvcProfInqRs> messages are borrowed from IFXbut minimized to only provide information for the <MsgSupt> function in the IFX Specification.

• The <PendingResponseInqRq> and <PendingResponseInqRs> messages for asynchronousprocessing are defined in this section.

6 TRANSPORT AND PACKAGING SPECIFICATION

This section was written by ACORD with very little influence from the IFX specification. No content wasborrowed from IFX.

• ACORD makes use of multipart-MIME to send binary data outside of the XML Stream whereas IFX

defines a Binary data type for use inside the XML stream.

7 XML FORMAT SPECIFICATION

ACORD borrowed a few items form the IFX specification and modified them slightly.

• The IFX Processing Instruction was changed to the ACORD processing instruction but the contentremains the same

• ACORD uses a different Document Type Declaration

• ACORD does not make use of XML namespaces in the same way as IFX.

• ACORD defines a limited use of attributes

• ACORD defines XPATH usage in support of the Extensions Service

• ACORD borrowed the File-Based Error Recovery section as is from the IFX Specification.


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