Resource Builder

In the previous post, we gave an overview of clinFHIR – the tooling developed to help Clinicians and other business folk understand FHIR, and help to guide its development. In this post we’re going to look into the Resource builder in more detail.

Load clinFHIR (by navigating to clinFHIR.com in your browser) and then load the Resource builder by clicking in the link in the top left panel (or the gear icon in the upper right). The following screen will be displayed:

The Resource Builder actually has two modes:

• A mode where you create a new resource. This is the view shown above, and is displayed by selecting the ‘new’ button to the upper left. This mode will be the subject of this post.
• A mode that allows you to browse the resources that have been created for a particular patient, and is selected by clicking the ‘resources’ button to the upper left. We won’t talk about that here (there’s another post for that) – and it’s quite likely that this function will be split out into its own component as clinFHIR matures.

Under the navbar at the top of the screen is a toolbar with a number of controls in it. Let’s take a look at these. From the left to the right:

• The ‘clear’ button will delete the current resource you are creating, and reset everything so you can start again. It’s useful when you are just playing around, or have made a big mess and just want to start again.
• The ‘core resource definitions’ contains a drop down of the base FHIR resources (at least as they are currently – they’ll change over time). Here is where you select the type of resource you want to create.
• ‘Profiled resource definitions’ are where you can select a resource that has been ‘profiled’ – or altered to suit a particular use case. Profiling is going to be really important in FHIR, and we’ll have a post (or two) coming up to talk about it. We won’t be using that for now – but we will later!
• ‘Parked resources’ – and the associated ‘select parked’ button are where the resources that are only partly built can be retrieved. We’ll talk about parking in a little while.
• The list icon shows a history of all parked resources. More to come.

OK, let’s create a resource.

From the ‘Core resource definitions’ drop down, select the ‘Condition’ resource type. You’ll get a display that looks like this:

There’s a lot to see!

The builder is essentially divided into two panels – left and right. You can thing of the right pane as a ‘navigator’ as you are building the resource.

• At the top is a ‘breadcrumb’ that tells you where you are in the resource. This becomes useful as you start to create ‘child’ elements within the resource. The globe icon to the left will display the current specification of this resource type in a separate browser tab – useful when you have a question about a particular resource element.
• To the right of the breadcrumb is a red exclamation mark. This indicates that clinFHIR has detected a quality issue with the resource. Clicking on it will display the details – for example a coded element in the resource that doesn’t have a valueSet bound to it to describe the possible values. You can ignore this (though it is interesting) unless you are a member of the HL7 committee that is responsible for the resource – in which case you should fix it! Clicking the icon again will hide the details – it’s a toggle.
• Next is a list of all the elements within the resource. This list is in a fixed space in the browser, so you may need to scroll it to see the complete list. The list is actually a table which has the following columns:  (à todo inset !! ß)
• The element name – actually the ‘path’ of the element within the resource from the top of the resource (technically, we call this the root). If the element is required then it will be coloured red – otherwise black. Clicking on the element name will display the definition of the element in the right pane. Under the hood, even the base resources in FHIR are described using a profile (it’s called ‘eating your own dogfood) and this lets you examine the technical minutiae of the definition if you are so inclined.
• The next column is the ‘multiplicity’ of the element – how many are allowed within a single resource instance. There is a minimum  and maximum separated by 2 dots (this is standard UML modelling notation if you’re interested), but basically if the first number is 0 it’s optional – if it’s 1 then it’s required. The second number will either be 1 (you can only have one) or * (as many as you like).
• The third column is where it really gets interesting, as these are the permitted datatypes for this element. FHIR permits any element to have more than one datatype, and the ones defined for this element will be listed here. Clicking on the datatype will display a data entry form in the right pane – this is where you can actually enter the information.

Well, as so often seems to happen, this post has gone on long enough, so we’ll pick up the details in the next post. Feel free to experiment though, and feed any comments back through <<google support thingy>>