Hi Ime and others XForms is an intriguing technology and IMHO (and others' !) it seems very suited to generate forms from templates and their underlying archetypes .
I will first point you to two recent sources where XForms where mentioned within the openEHR community: 1. Wiki (look in the comments area): http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/User+Interface+and+openEHR+data 2. Mailing list thread: http://www.openehr.org/mailarchives/openehr-technical/msg03208.html So there are several people that have thought about or have actually implemented code regarding XForms & openEHR archetypes. I will try to list the relevant people that I know of: 1. Carl Alfon from Link?ping University (Sweden) currently writes a thesis on "Archetype based EHR GUI". In his practical work he generates XForms using the openEHR ADL parser plus custom code. 2. Adam Flinton from the NHS has an "complete Xml forms engine" which can be used with (besides others) XForms ("Chiba to render into Ajax-ified html"). He also offered that this could be open-sourced. 3. Lisa Thurston from Ocean Informatics wrote a set of customizable/extendable XSLT scripts that creates a generic read-only view of openEHR instance data. 4. Heath Frankel (programming lead at Ocean Informatics) and I have thought about using the Template Data Schemas (TDS) that can be generated from templates (using the template designer) as the basis for the XForms model. Tests are needed whether the currenty availble XForms engine implementations support such complex nested schemas... 5. Myself, I have the humble goal (because I have so little time) of writing a XForms GUI for a small template with only a couple of archetypes that connects directly to an IBM DB2 server via web services. Will start with a static one but finally generating it would be awesome... A first test with a trivial 4 field form was successful in retrieving and uploading data from the DB2 server. 6. There are a couple of more ppl generally interested in openEHR GUIs: Helma van der Linden (University of Maastricht), Erik Sundval (University of Link?ping) and Sam Heard & Hugh Leslie from Ocean Informatics. I think we should join forces and create a sub-project to share ideas and maybe code for an "openEHR XForms Toolkit". I have proposed this in December already but have been slack & busy. What is everybody's opinion (especially the people listed) on such a project? Regarding GUI generation in general Hugh has argued that it won't necessarily will be the most usable forms. I think that this is true (and for complex data entry in complicated clinical workflows it will propably never change) and in that case the generated GUI would be a good start to for further hand-coded customization ("scaffolding GUI code"). However one day we might be surprised by the power of XForms especially once the engines have become even better and special openEHR widget extensions are available (see again http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2007/isbn9789512285662/isbn9789512285662.pdf). Will be on a long anticipated and much needed skiing holiday for the next 7 days, so won' t be able to reply until I return. Cheers, Thilo PS: See one more remark inline. On Feb 9, 2008 4:50 PM, Ime Asangansi <asangansi at yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > I am working on a project that might involve generating xforms from > archetypes. While there are many possibilities in doing this (including an > internal form schema designer within the OpenMRS that is infopath-based), > before making design decisions, I would really like to learn from people who > are using archetypes to drive Xforms generation for their app. > And how is the seemingly complex archetype 'definition' part handled? > > Also I would really like to know how the interface in the Ocean/LiU editors > are generated? > XSLT or ...? No XSLT but going recursively through the object model in the kernel component to create a certain widget for every datatype at the leaf nodes. But others know better. > > Thirdly, has or is any one working on translating openehr archetype based > messages to HL7 v2? I might need to translate (or transform) Xml data to > HL7. > > Thanks, in anticipation. > > rgds, > Ime > > > > > ________________________________ > Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage. > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical > >
