Re: [COAS-List] Reminder: Conference Call

[Tim Brinson <tim@protocol.com>]

"David W. Forslund" wrote:
> 
> As a follow up on the conference call today, I wanted to indicate an area
> where XML could be of benefit.
> Being able to add traits to PIDS dynamically could be very valuable.
> Currently it requires adding some IDL
> and recompiling and some programming.  If these traits could be specified
> with XML they could be added dynamically
> quite easily without having to reprogram the server.  We have generated a
> DTD which describes an extended
> set of traits as an example of what could be done.  This results in a
> "template" of traits which could be used to
> easily extend PIDS without reprogramming the IDL.  I think such a feature
> could be of value for COAS, too, and
> perhaps even more important.

Sorry Dave I don't follow.  The traits in PIDS are name/value pairs
where the name is a "string" and the value is an "any".  Why do you need
to change any IDL to add new traits?  If the data type passed in the any
is a new data type then you would have to create the IDL for that.  The
data types for the HL7 and vCard traits are all strings right now.  When
you get the string it has to be parsed by the appropriate rules.  If you
receive XML it would also be parsed - by XML rules instead of HL7 ASN.1
or vCard.  For HL7 V3.0 I would expect PIDS traits will be XML.  Are you
suggesting it should use XML for all traits?

The reason name/value pairs were chosen are for the dynamic
capabilities.  Traits are tagged data.  XML is also tagged data.  Are
you saying we should have tagged tagged data?


Tim
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