GraphBuilder and R5

Just a short post to follow up on using GraphBuilder for building examples.

To help support people building R5 examples for connectathon, I’ve added the ability to select the version of FHIR to use for the graph. Currently the R4 and R5 draft release are supported (as these are the versions that sushi supports).

To set the FHIR version for your project, create a new project and select the FHIR version at the bottom of the form. This has a number of consequences:

• The resource types available for selection are those in the selected release
• The links to the spec and details of the resource types will point to the selected version

Some things to be aware of.

• If you’re saving the graph to a FHIR server, make it supports your version – generally the public HAPI server will, though you’ll need to select the R5 version. The server is also specified in the project – there are a couple hard wired, but you can enter the base Url of any FHIR server.
• The XML views of resources isn’t (yet) working with R5
• It’s probably not best to mix versions – ie start with R4 then change to R5 as non-normative resources can change between versions, so existing content may not be valid in a newer version. And I’ve also noticed some weird errors, so not a good thing.
• Sushi support for R5 is experimental – it seems to work OK so far, but no guarantees!

The other change I’ve made recently is to make it easier to manually insert references into the FSH (from the FSH Editor screen). There are areas where, right now, the way in which references are inserted through the User Interface needs a bit of attention. For example, when creating a Document you can add a new section to the Composition (using the Backbone elements tab from the main screen) but that allows only a single resource to be referenced. You can always edit the FSH directly to add others, but it’s a pain to get the target resource id.

Now, there’s a tab in the FSH Editor where you can add a reference by selecting the resource from a list. You’ll need to figure out the path yourself, but at least it’s easier than the previous way. (and a reminder that the FSH supports soft indexing, which makes it easier to insert multiple elements – like multiple references in a Composition.section). What I’ve found seems to work well is to insert the reference, then edit the FSH directly to set the element.

As always, if you have issues then contact me in the FHIR chat.