‘1.3.DEFINING MESSAGE CHARACTERISTICS

For every message to be sent via the network, the following structural characteristics should be met:

• The ‘From’ item of the message contains the senders applications address.

  For example:

  From: vision@vision-mailer.nl

• The ‘To’ item of the message contains the recipients application address.

  For example:

  To: vision@vision-mailer.de

  Implementation tip: be aware that it is possible to make use of multiple recipients delimited by commas. But if the application does so, on received FORMs R it has to determine the FORM R sender, because it will receive references to identical message-identifiers (heading ‘000’). Sending separate messages to each partner State with different ‘000’ headings is less confusing.

• The ‘Subject’ item of the message contains a ‘file number’ and a full stop (‘.’) followed by the form-type identifier (Letter: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’ or ‘R’). For the respective forms, the ‘file number’ equals the content of its heading: ‘001’ in FORM ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’ and the content of heading ‘048’ in a FORM E. For heading definitions see 2.1.2.

  Examples:

  • Subject:AUT0000010106AJKT00.B

  • Subject:FRA2007022457471104.E

  If a Member State receives a message with an incorrectly formulated subject, it has to discard that message without processing it. If the problem persists it has to be solved bilaterally by the technical staff.

• The mail body has to be structured as follows:

  • ‘text/plain’ is used as the ‘Media Type’ or ‘Mime Type’ see RFC2046 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046),

  • ‘ISO-8859-15’ is used as the ‘charset’.

• Hence in the ‘Header’ of every mail, the following line will appear:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset = ISO-8859-15.’.

‘2.2.1.Three-letter codes (ICAO)

Codes for States, entities, territories, nationalities and organisations as well as further designations for the VISION consultation procedure.

Three-letter codes, as set out in ICAO Document 9303 on Machine-Readable Travel Documents, shall be used except in the following cases:

1. 1.

   for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, XXG shall be used;

2. 2.
   for Kosovo14, XXD shall be used;
3. 3.

   for the Federal Republic of Germany, DEU shall be used.

Two lists will be made available on CIRCA:

• 1. An ICAO-based code list15

  the latest version of the ICAO-based codes with the three exceptions mentioned above to be used for VISION consultation. This list shall be used in line with the list established by Regulation (EC) No 539/2001.

• 2. A special VISION code list

  the limited list of special VISION three-letter codes for specific cases.

Both lists will contain, next to the appropriate three-letter codes to be used for VISION consultation ‘valid from’ and ‘valid until’-values for these codes:

• — Valid-Until

  Date from which the code becomes obsolete for VISION consultation,

• — Valid-From

  Date from which the code becomes applicable to be used for VISION consultation.

If ICAO-updates are detected by a Member State or the Commission, it will immediately notify the General Secretariat of the Council. The ICAO-based code list will be updated by the Presidency as follows:

• new ICAO-codes shall be added with a ‘valid from’ date 30 days after publication of the updated list on CIRCA,

• for removed ICAO-codes the ‘valid until’ date shall be set 30 days after publication of the updated list on CIRCA and shall be kept for archival purposes.

If, for technical reasons (e.g. old passports that are still valid), an expired ICAO-code has to be used further in the VISION Consultation Network, or in general if, for technical reasons, a new three-letter code is deemed necessary, this code shall be added to the special VISION code list after agreement in the Visa/VISION Working Party.

The General Secretariat of the Council shall notify Member States every time an updated list has been published on CIRCA.’.