Trading partners may be set up to both send and receive 997 functional acknowledgements under functional group “FA”. 997s are created to send for any X12 transaction received into Extol. 997s may be received for any outbound X12 transaction generated by the software. Functional acknowledgements are a means of tracking whether trading partners are receiving data sent to them via the inbound 997, or notifying trading partners that X12 transactions were received and whether or not that received data was accepted with no errors, accepted with errors, or rejected. Beginning with Extol Release 5.5e, syntax validation was added based on inbound maps for the creation of outbound 997s to trading partners with the proper trading partner setup and specification via a data area if some syntax errors that would typically allow translation to continue to reject. If the data area is not set up to stop for all syntax errors at the unwrap phase, the reject response code should not be used unless the error code generated will cause a fatal translation.

**NOTE** - DO NOT SET YOUR TRADING PARTNER MESSAGE CLASS LEVEL TRADING PARTNER DETAILS 2 SCREEN UP TO GENERATE OR RECEIVE 997S FOR 997S. BE SURE YOU DEFAULT THE FIRST 2 PARAMETERS TO “N” FOR THIS SCREEN. It could issue a never ending loop between you and your trading partner.