On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 15:50, Andrew Ho wrote: > Yes, since Form A can contain a quetion item that uses a > pickone_from_form response that depends on a question item on Form B, Form > A and Form B can be linked via this question item: > Form A Form B > Cancer Case Number <------- Cancer Case Number > Histology Date discovered > Staging Cancer name
This is fine - the only wrinkle is that the end user has to specify the relationship manually using the pickone_from_form question on Form A. Nevertheless, it is probably an acceptable solution for individuals or very small groups who are highly motivated to collect small amounts of data very carefully, although even then there is a risk of accidentally choosing the wrong Cancer Case Number. > > In other words, can't I have a complex form? > > We don't have simple vs. complex forms. OIO forms are rather flat and > quite simple. However, this issue has been raised quite a few times by > Alex Chelnokov. "Complex" forms which allow master-detail or parent-child data entry are the solution to the above problem. However, they can be quite tricky to implement successfully, in a general manner, using plain HTML (or HTML plus common JavaScript) - which is required if client requirements are to be kept minimal. Using client-side Java or soem other GUI framework (including browser plug-ins etc), the programming task is simplified but the deployment task made more harder. > OpenEHR's "organizer" archetype provides an useful mechanism to model > hierarchical relationships between attributes within each archetype. If we > add complex forms to OIO, we will probably copy OpenEHR's archetype > "organizer" design > (page 30, http://www.openehr.org/downloads/archetypes/archetypes.pdf). > > What do you think? Do you mean "organiser concepts", as opposed to "content concepts". I don't see how this particularly helps with specifying entity relations. I think you might get more value out of the QUANTITY attribute and the A_RELATIONSHIP class (p36 of above reference). -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
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