re: Survey - Proposed API change to make related items easier to work with...

John Lohan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:31:13 GMT

Hello Eric,

I don't think introducing ClientId makes the problem any simpler. Rather, I'm more comfortable with the current implementation. Less the number of GUIDs we come accross, less the confusion.

But let me tell you my main concern.

I can relate one thing with another, but how do I specify what is the relationship?

E.g. I can relate an Allergy with a Procedure. But how do I specify that the related GUID is referring to an allergy?

Say, I use RelationshipType string.

But how will the other applications know what is the meaning of the string?

Also, how do I know that this relationship was added by me? In this case, every application should carefully prefix the RelationshipType string with some unique string (e.g. name of the application).

This doesn't sound a good mechanism, since we are at the discretion of each and every application using HV.

As per my opinion, we should have another member of HealthRecordItemRelationship class named RelatedItemType of type HVThingTypesEnum, which is an enum of all the thing types (including application-specific).

And preferably it should be a non-nullable field.

Let me know if you thing this will add any value.