This isagain one of the little known facts when troubleshooting your HIPPA or EDI test or production enviornment. Since the service does not store the original filename of documents that are brought in using the file or ftp recieve handler, you are stuck with having to search for files using the control number and sender/receiver ids. This is ‘officially’ how you are supposed to do it, but how many of us in the EDI/HIPAA world actually have been born and raised following the standards? Rules are made to be broken! Yes, even if we have to adhere to the guidelines for correct payments, there is always the enviornments that we are placed in where the client calls up and states, ‘where did my file go?’ Actually, come to think of it, I have never heard where a client calls in and states, ‘where did my interchange go?’ Yes if we were all using clearing houses it would be one thing, but most (not all) of the clients I have worked for do not. I guess that the client thinks, ‘why pay for a service that does not add any more value than a server that stores files for us that we can host ourselves?’

So the HIPAA and Base EDI stores the data in the %documentshome%\System\External\{Inbox|Outbox} with a continually incrementing number.in/.out filename. A while ago I attempted to search for a particular trading partners files, of course I did not know the filename, I just knew their id and their control number. Actually, I did not know their control number, but I did know their sender id, I just went into the …\External\Inbox\ and searched for * where the ‘A word or phrase in the file:’ I put in their sender id and clicked <Search> came up with nothing. Now I knew that files with that id were in there, but the search capability was not working. I asked the network adminand he said that it was because of a policyrunning on the servers and it could not be changed. I then had to resort to going to aDOS prompt.

New client, same issue. I calledup the network admin and asked themif they could change the policy, smart guy, likable fellow, but his first word was ‘HUH?’ I explained thesituation, that I could not find any files with the text containing their id were found. He placed a .txt file in the folder and filled it witha little known football team’s name ‘Raiders’ and then did a text search for the file. VIOLA-> it found it.

I then told him I would look into it. I found this article. I then found the entry in my registry : HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\ContentIndex\ and I changed FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions from Hexidecimal value from 0 to 1 and did my search again and it started finding the files.

This is going to help me track down EDI files significantly!