Records and Fields
The BizTalk Editor uses records and fields to present a document structure. Records and fields represent two types of components found in electronic data interchange (EDI) documents: segments and elements. A field corresponds to an EDI element and a record corresponds to an EDI segment. In regards to XML, we can think of a field as an element that either contains text or has no content at all, and a record as an element that can contain text, content, or other elements. As you can see in Figure 16-2, the root node was a record that contained four fields. The BizTalk Editor interprets the data contained in the records and fields of a document specification and creates a specification that is an XML representation of the document.
In Figure 16-2, you can also see that the BizTalk Editor has five tabs: Declaration, Reference, Parse, Dictionary, and Code List. Let's examine these tabs in more detail.