GSoC 2023 at OpenMRS | Coding Period Week 06

 

Welcome to the sixth week of my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) journey! It's hard to believe how quickly time has flown by as I continue to dive deeper into my project and explore new territories. This week has been full of exciting challenges and rewarding accomplishments, pushing me further towards my goals.

Throughout the program, I have had the opportunity to work closely with dedicated mentors and a vibrant community of like-minded developers at OpenMRS. Their guidance and support have been invaluable in shaping my understanding the FHIR Api and how OpenMRS leverages its functionality. As I reflect on the progress made so far, I am filled with a sense of gratitude and enthusiasm for the road ahead.

In this blog post, I will delve into the highlights and key learnings from the sixth week of my GSoC project. I will share the hurdles I encountered, the strategies I employed to overcome them, and the valuable insights gained along the way. Additionally, I will provide updates on the project's overall direction and discuss the exciting features and improvements implemented during this period.

Join me as I recount the fascinating moments, breakthroughs, and challenges encountered in the sixth week of my GSoC journey. I hope that my experiences and insights can inspire and resonate with fellow developers, and perhaps even offer valuable takeaways for those embarking on similar endeavors.

Without further ado, let's dive into the adventures of the past week and explore the strides taken towards making a meaningful contribution to the open-source community through my GSoC project.

Goal of the week

• Ensure that XML PATCHing works as it should on all the Fhir Resources that support patching in the OpenMRS Fhir2 Module. They should be able to take in an xml document like the one shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!--
    This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License,
    v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can
    obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. OpenMRS is also distributed under
    the terms of the Healthcare Disclaimer located at http://openmrs.org/license.
    Copyright (C) OpenMRS Inc. OpenMRS is a registered trademark and the OpenMRS
    graphic logo is a trademark of OpenMRS Inc.
-->
<diff xmlns:fhir="http://hl7.org/fhir">
	<replace sel="/fhir:MedicationDispense/fhir:status/@value">
		completed
	</replace>
</diff>

Let us break down the xml document for better understanding of what is going on there:-

1. The root element is named diff and it belongs to the XML namespace "http://hl7.org/fhir". Namespaces allow for the differentiation of elements with the same name but belonging to different contexts or specifications. 
2. Within the diff element, there is a child element named replace. It specifies the XPath expression sel attribute which selects a specific attribute value in the XML document. In this case, it selects the value attribute of the status element under the MedicationDispense element in the FHIR namespace. The text content within the replace element is completed, indicating the new value that will replace the selected attribute's current value.Therefore, the above XML patch document  modifies an existing XML document in the OpenMRS Fhir2 Module.

Highlights / Pull Requests

• Clean up parameter passing in Practitioner Service class method: Service classes that support searching will often accept a long list of optional search parameters, where most of these parameters are not used (and thus passed in as null). This can lead to noisy and hard to maintain code. I pulled all search parameters for the Practitioner Service class into a separate searchParams class.
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - MedicationDispense
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Task Resource.
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Medication Resource.
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - DiagnosticReport
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - MedicationRequest
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Condition
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Person
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - AllergyIntolerance
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Practitioner
• Add Support for XML PATCHing operations - Patient
• Clean up parameter passing in Medication Service class method

Thanks for taking time to go through the blog! 

Nice week ahead, cheers!