Engineering data message

Engineering Data Message ( ENGDAT ) is an industry standard for electronic data interchange (EDI) of CAD files between CAD workstations of different companies. It corresponds to recommendation 4951 of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) and the Odette standard ODG11ED9206. The user data is combined into a message with a structured metadata file and sent. The metadata contain, among other things, information about the sender and recipient, optionally also about the purpose, status and free text.

A supplement is ENGPART (for Engineering Partner Message ), which defines messages for the exchange of partner master data of the CAD workstations.

The files are kept together by so-called logical file names that are transferred with all files. The logical file name, for example ENG040317135500ABCDE002001, consists of 26 characters and is composed as follows: "ENG", date and time, address code, number of files and the serial number of the file.

ENGDAT and ENGPART are based on the transport protocol Odette File Transfer Protocol (OFTP, VDA recommendation 4914/2).