Message

German: Nachricht

List of fields, values and their context

The structure of filingValues is based on the ELSTER XML Documentation.

The ELSTER field code, its description, context (in the XML structure) and validation rules can be found in Excel files on the appropriate data type page.

The files can be opened with as Spreadsheet Reader (e. g. Excel).

The sheets * - Felder include the codes and description (columns B and C), as well as allowed values, length and regex expression every field validates against (columns E, F and I). This also applies to attachments to the main form.

Rows marked as(alt) denote, that a change has been made to its parameters (eg. Context) compared to the previous version of the documentation.

Attachment requirements

Messages support attachments (except: Appeal Withdrawal and Bank Details).

Attachments send to the fiscal authorities might be removed for security reasons or other limitations some time after the submission. When removed a message is being sent out and a detailed information should be retrieved from ELSTER, therefore: listing and single retrieval of the feedback messages is part of the retrieval process. Checking for the availability of new feedback messages should be triggered daily and the information forwared to the end-user.

Fullfilling the below mentioned requirements minimizes the amount of removed attachments by ELSTER.

Requirements

• Mime-Type: application/pdf

• File size is greater than 0 Bytes

• File size of a single PDF file does not exceed 10.485.760 Bytes

• Valid PDF file (for example pdfinfo does not return any errors)

• At least one PDF page

• At most 100 PDF pages

• PDF does not have any active content (like JavaScript or Forms)

• PDF does not contain malware

Typically 20 attachments can be sent with in one message. All attachments in one message can not exceed 38.700.000 Bytes.

Features

Attachments

Data provided in filingAttachments gets persisted in the database. To not bloat the database there is an option to store attachments in a (dedicated) S3 bucket and provide only a reference to that file in filings in filingAttachments.Anhang[].Dateiinhalt .

Requirements

• a S3 bucket has to be configured. Recommendation: designated separate bucket

• file content is stored as a base64 encoded string in S3

• file name is unique (might contain userId and year, eg. user12345/2023/uniqueid.pdf)

• file name ends with .pdf

• file name is provided in filingAttachments.Anhang[].Dateiinhalt

Example in Postman: Subsequent with linked attachments

During validation with usecase: validate size of attachment (German: "Dateigröße [in Byte]" ) printed on PDF file is 1 Byte. No validation of attachments file content is being performed during usecase: validate. Please make sure, that the linked file is a valid base64 string.

Settings

FEATURES_ATTACHMENTS_IN_S3

Default: false for disabled. Set true to enable

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_BUCKET,

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_DEFAULT_REGION

Analog to AWS_*

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_ENDPOINT

Hostname with protocol (and port) on which S3 is expecting requests. For example: http://s3:9000.

S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_PATH_STYLE

Default: false. By default bucket name is added as subdomain to defined host. Set to true to use with Minio and add it to path.

Example

Minimal configuration needed on staging:

FEATURES_ATTACHMENTS_IN_S3=true
S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_ENDPOINT=http://s3:9000
S3_ELSTER_ATTACHMENTS_PATH_STYLE=true