Paul, A question regarding OpenMRS data entry forms. I notice form this wiki page: http://openmrs.org/wiki/FormEntry_Technical_Overview - that Microsoft InfoPath is used for form-based data collection in OpenMRS. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, that means that sites running OpenMRS need to license Microsoft InfoPath, which is part of the enterprise version of Microsoft Office, and/or Microsoft SharePoint Server, in order to serve up InfoPath forms? Is that correct? Or do users need to have an InfoPath "runtime" package installed on their (presumably Windows-only) client workstations? Or is OpenMRS just using the InfoPath form layout XML format, and provides its own form engine to interpret and render those XML form definitions on users' computers?
I'm not asking these questions by way of criticism (for use of a closed source solution) - pragmatism should always win over open source purism if there is no other way, in my view. I am just curious about how you arrived at this particular mix of Microsoft and OpenMRS software? We wrestled with the problem of online forms for NetEpi Collection, and seriously investigated the XForms standard for defining form layouts, validation and other runtime behaviour using XML, but decided to ignore it because a) it was vastly over-complex and b) hardly anyone seems to be implementing it - Microsoft have Infopath/SharePoint instead, and others are working on "Web Forms 2.0", which is much simpler (and which we may eventually adopt). We also looked at Adobe Acrobat, because the full version of Acrobat allows you to define data entry forms which can be both printed (for handwritten completion) and/or filled in online, using the free Acrobat Reader software. I note that STC, which is probably the largest and best known vendor of closed-source public health software, uses Adobe Acrobat for its user-defined custom data entry/paper-based data collection forms. In the end, we implemented our own forms engine, which stores definitions in simple XML documents held in the database. The result is adequate, but it is not as slick or as capable as we would like, and was a lot harder to do than we thought. I'm not absolutely convinced it was the right decision. Tim C
