The last few days have been spent learning about and understanding the workings of the ODA plug-in. It’s fairly complicated, and the actual documentation on how it interacts with BIRT is sparse. So, among other things recently, I’ve put together a small document that basically does a walkthrough of the user’s interaction with BIRT and the ODA plug-in. It includes some of the main functions called, to give an idea of what kind of data is being created and requested at each step, using the FlatFile ODA plug-in as a basis. I’ve uploaded a copy of that at this link, though the original is part of a larger, growing document in Google Docs.
I believe that eventually, the (larger, currently growing) document will become quite helpful to those who are trying to build an ODA plug-in of their own. The document actually includes a lot of OpenMRS specifics, but I’d like to create a sort of partially genericized version eventually.
Other news of late includes me finally understanding how the OpenMRS database is accessed through the code. I’ll talk about that more some other time, as currently there’s still more I have to learn, such as how I can work through the Logic Service, and I feel it’d be an incomplete entry as of now. I don’t usually do this much planning before jumping into a coding project, but this is such a complex system that any coding I had written a week ago I’d likely want to throw away today. The project is progressing nevertheless.
