Let me note that this is only a particular case of higher-level registries. AFAIK, at the moment, our approach to higher-level registries is to expose our metadata through REST and let the higher-level registry manipulate it. I think we should be more supportive, and that the solution for this problem should be taken in the broader context.
In the narrower context, I think the better approach would be for the form developer to send the descriptions and id/uuids of his/her proposed concepts to the central authority, which either accepts them or provides substitute concepts with their own id/uuids. Our task would be to make this substitution easy, given that we are now capable of having concept-valued global properties and attributes, and of packaging concepts into custom data types. In this regard, I developed a protocol for this type of proposal/substitution for use in the HR module last summer. It worked OK so long as the central authority did not make a mistake; it did not have a means for the central authority to request a substitution except in response to a proposal from the field. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Seaton Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 2:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OPENMRS-DEV] Concept Proposals: a simpler workflow Hi Darius, I think this is a great solution, and would meet our form development needs very well. We can certainly talk about potential for developer collaboration on this, though I can't promise anything... Thanks for thinking this through, Mike On 05/10/2012 02:01 PM, Darius Jazayeri wrote: Hi All, I'm working through a simpler approach to Concept Proposals that what has been attempted several times before, and never finished, and I thought I'd share my thoughts while they're fresh. I'm particularly interested in the scenario where: * In the cloud there's a concept authority (in my case MVP/CIEL) who manages your dictionary, and you periodically pull updates from there * You have one server that has your official concept dictionary (could be your metadata, forms, or production server) * No development work happens directly on this machine. Concept dictionary and forms are developed elsewhere, and imported. * You have one or more development machines where you do (potentially-messy) development and testing of forms So, the forms development workflow would basically be: 1. On a development machine, starting with your master dictionary, you work on a form. It is expected that you will create a bunch of new concepts, revise them, and delete some of them that were mistakes. 2. When your form is ready-to-go, you identify all concepts on your form that do not come from the master dictionary (i.e. they were newly-created) * with HTML Form Entry this should be easy to automate, by checking whether there are any concept references not in the form of MVP:###. Maybe XForms and Infopath could do something similar. 1. You send that batch of new concepts up to a web service on the concept authority in the cloud, as proposals. You get back tokens you can use to check the status of your proposals. 2. (Periodically you ping the concept authority, until all proposals from that batch are resolved.) 3. You hit the concept authority and download its official versions of the concepts that you created locally, and these replace your locally-created concepts. * I hope we can leverage the Metadata Sharing module to do this pretty easily. 1. (Depending on the form entry technology) You edit your form to refer to the new official versions of the concepts you proposed. 2. At this point you export the form from your dev machine, and import it into your metadata/forms/production server. I think the difference between this and prior work on Concept Proposal is that I'm saying: 1. You should do forms development on a separate dev machine whose dictionary is expected to get messy. 2. Instead of creating concept proposals, you create actual concepts, so you can do real testing with them. All this leads me to think that we can produce a minimum viable product<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product> of the Concept Proposal module with only these features: (client-side, for use on forms development machines) * every time you create a new concept, it is marked as "temporary" * you can view a list of all temporary concepts, and delete ones you don't like * you can select some temporary concepts and "propose to master dictionary" * you can see a list of all your submitted proposals, along with their current status * when a proposal has been marked as complete by the server, it will overwrite your local "temporary" concept with the new one officially created, and clear the "temporary" flag. (server-side) * web service for proposing a batch of concepts * web service for checking the status of a proposal * UI showing a list of all open proposals * UI for choosing the action for each item in the batch of proposals * Created New Concept (specify the concept) * Already Exists (specify the concept) * Rejected (specify the free-text reason) * Email notification when a new proposal comes in. It's possible that some ThoughtWorks developers-in-training might work on this as a project. Or I might propose this as a sprint. What do people think about the approach? In particular, is there anyone out there who finds this approach consistent with their needs, and would contribute some dev time to helping make it happen? -Darius ________________________________ Click here to unsubscribe<mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-devel-l> from OpenMRS Developers' mailing list ________________________________ Click here to unsubscribe<mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-devel-l> from OpenMRS Developers' mailing list _________________________________________ To unsubscribe from OpenMRS Developers' mailing list, send an e-mail to [email protected] with "SIGNOFF openmrs-devel-l" in the body (not the subject) of your e-mail. [mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-devel-l]
