Dear Devs, I have been working to document the Maintenance section of DHIS2, and have a few observations and would like to have some feedback before I file, what I think should be a blueprint.
One of my big complaints about DHIS2 is that it is exceedingly difficult to simply browse data that has been entered. One can create a report (rather painful) or use the data entry screens to browse data, but this too seems a bit of a kludge, when I might just want to simply quickly view data for a given orgunit/period/dataset combination. This is a very common operation on the part of users. I was expecting to find this in the "Data browser", however, this is not exactly what the data browser does, as far as I can tell. The data browser provides a summary of the data contained in the database, providing the number of data element values that are present, and they can be grouped a couple of different ways. I have reviewed the /dhis2/dhis-2/dhis-api/src/main/java/org/hisp/dhis/databrowser/DataBrowserTable.java and also crosschecked this against the screen found at (http://dhis.uio.no/demo/dhis-web-maintenance-dataadmin/searchResult.action?periodTypeId=Monthly&fromDate=2009-04-01&toDate=2009-08-31&searchOption=DataSet). This appears to be a summary of the number of elements contained in a given dataset for a given period interval. This is fine and quite handy I guess. Now, this is where things get tricky.. http://dhis.uio.no/demo/dhis-web-maintenance-dataadmin/searchResult.action?searchOption=DataSet&parent=233&periodType=Monthly&toDate=2009-08-31&fromDate=2009-04-01 provides a summary ( I think) of the number of data element values for a given data element and period interval, which is also handy. However, I feel this may be very misleading, because of the name "Data browser". We are looking here at the "COUNT" of data element values, not the "SUM" and not browsing the actual data values themselves. If an untrained eye were to see the results of the URL above, it might be very misleading. I therefore would like to suggest that we come up with a new name for the "Data browser", but I do not really know what it should be called. I just think that it should be clear that we are not actually browsing data, but rather looking at a summary (namely the number of data element values) for a particular set of parameters. Regardless of this, I think having the functionality to simply browse raw data itself, without having to go either through a report, or data entry form, would be very useful. I was planning to write this up as a blueprint, but would appreciate some comments on what I have written here first. Best regards, Jason _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-devs Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-devs More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
