In a version 005010 271 transaction, when a payer (information source) sends a URL (like for a provider portal) in the Loop ID-2100A PER04 field, what is the appropriate format? Are they supposed to send a complete URL which fully conforms to IETF RFC 3986 <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986> including the scheme, or should they send only the authority and path components as defined in RFC 3986 Section 3? If the former, should they use the percent-encoding mechanism as per RFC 3986 Section 2.1 for any characters not included in the X12 character set? In other words, which of these two sample segments represents the best practice?
- PER*IC*Portal*UR*https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com/portal~
- PER*IC*Portal*UR*www.example.com/portal~
We want to turn URLs received from payers into live web links and need to understand the expected format.
While there is nothing explicitly identifying the format of the URL, for a public facing URL to have any value, it needs to be as clear and consistent with other URLs that are supported by the owner of the domain. Both examples work if the delimiters defined in the ISA are not used. Example 2 is compliant with this TR3, as is part of the URL present in example 1, which is also compliant with this implementation guide, assuming the values shown in either example are not used as delimiters.
It is recommended that the URL used in the EDI transaction does not contain any values that conflict with the delimiters identified in the ISA. Your choice of delimiters should not conflict with values in URLs, for example the colon or the percent sign. Values should be chosen to avoid characters used in URLs.