Creating examples

Examples are probably one of the more useful things to an implementer – yet likely the least exciting part of building an Implementation Guide (IG) to the designer. And not only are they useful to the implementer, they are a good way to double check the actual IG – it’s surprising how often having to create an example finds issues with the artifacts within an IG.

But the tooling to create examples is not that great. Generally you’re using a generic JSON or XML tool which offers no editing support to ensure that the example is valid (you can use the $validate operation that I’ve discussed before, but the workflow is tedious). I’ve tried to use clinFHIR for that – and it does work, though chokes some of the more complex profiles, and is still quite slow to create the resource instance.

There is an alternative that I’m currently using that seems to resolve these issues – the shorthand spec (with associated sushi reference implementation) that I blogged about last week. As well as producing profiles, it can also create resource instances using the same syntax as for profiles, and even better – when you run sushi to generate the resources, it will pick up the more egregious errors.

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Subscriptions

For those interested in Subscriptions – here’s a blog post from Gino Canessa of Microsoft who is deeply involved in the R5 redesign of this, particularly the Subscription resource.