Midterm Update

So I find myself just past the midterm of the program, at the end of week 7, looking back at the progress that I’ve made so far. I’m quite happy with what I’ve achieved so far. Not because I’ve got a monstrous load of code written, or because I’ve finished ahead of schedule. Rather, I’m doing fine on the code front, but the thing I’m most happy with is what I’ve learned about doing real work in the software development world. But I won’t go into that now… I need some material for an end-of-summer blog post, don’t I?

I’ve all but finished the runtime driver (a task that feels like it should be given more than half a sentence), and work on the user interface has started. There probably should have been more time for work on the interface, but I’m going to have much fewer false starts on this, now that I know where I can find information. Documentation has been created and updated, both at the Reporting Framework Integration Project page and at the BIRT ODA Plugin User Guide page. The user guide is incomplete, as the plugin has yet to be finished, and there is nothing to return data as of yet. The Project page now outlines the project better, and includes an outline for the project in what I’ve done so far and what is planned.

The project page also includes some of the latest news in the XML schema, which includes dropping of the <table> tag. We couldn’t really imagine people needing multiple tables, so it was dropped. I’m starting to think that some functions may change before long, so expect that page to be updated soon.

So what’s left in the project, you ask? Well, there are a few that need to be addressed big time.

• User interface needs to be implemented
• Each of the api functions of the Logic Web Service needs to be implemented in the REST Module

In addition to that, there are few things that would be nice to change before the project is done.  For one, it would be nice to update the plugin to play the best it can with the new version of BIRT, BIRT2.2.  It’s currently designed for 2.1, and I’ve made a few changes to make it compatible, so it does work, but I’d like to make sure everything is working just right.  Also, the user interface that gets implemented at first will likely be a stub that is not so polished, and could use work. So, the interface will need work. In addition to that, we may want to include searchable boxes of tokens, instead of forcing the user to search through the tokens themselves. We may also want the same kind of fancy setup that exists in the Flat File driver, allowing users to select tokens from a box on the left and move them over to a box on the left, choosing those tokens easily without having to click multiple tokens all while holding a key to select them all.

Milestones for the User Interface:

1. User can select a filter/cohort. Patient is the only allowed entity. All tokens are returned, and can be selectively placed in the report.
2. User can select an entity, which will affect the choices for filters. All tokens are returned based on which entity is chosen.
3. User selects entity, which affects the choices for filters and tokens. A filter is chosen, and tokens are selected from a list in a box.

This is the end of the user interface stub, which works fine. At this point, the REST Module will have to be implemented. There’s been a lot of planning, but I think lots of work is going to have to go into this, including many many questions to my mentor Justin.

All in all, though, the project is going well and I look forward to these final weeks.