Re: [emergency] Handling Default ValueLists

[Gavin Treadgold <gt@kestrel.co.nz>]

Hi all,

Still learning and trying to get up to speed here, so take my comments with a grain of salt :)

1. The concept of a registry is good, and I can see a case being made to have a national register that defines the code tables specific to a country - e.g. the US would have one registry, New Zealand another, Canada their own, etc. Whilst there is often a lot of similarities between these, there are often small tweaks required to different countries and their terminology.

2. I guess that it is up to the software to cache registries/code tables offline in case there is no connectivity during an emergency? I don't think we should be expecting realtime validation against a remote registry/code list during an emergency.

In terms of how it could be provided, I'd actually support making it available via as many means as possible. It shouldn't be limited to just XML, for example. It might be very useful for developers to also have code tables available as JSON via a REST interface, so that web applications can directly access the code tables as a web service (even if just internally between multiple web apps running on the same server).

This is something we've been working on in Sahana Eden, and it is quite capable at publishing the same data via a variety of different formats (just by tweaking the extension on the URL). Conceivably it should be quite easy to implement a registry or code table, and have it returned via XML, JSON, CSV and any other formats desired. Implementation of a new output format is pretty simple, it just requires the creation of a new XSLT stylesheet to define the export format.

So, what we may look at is a means of pulling down the authoritative online source e.g. CAP-CP in XML, and importing that to populate a local registry that can be used without having to poll on server on the internet everytime a CAP-CP message is created or read.

From our perspective, it would be great to package a list of online registries and code tables, and when a new server is activated, to go out and suck down the latest versions online (or even offline from a USB stick) and quickly setup a lot of this data for use in an application.

That said, I can also see the case where it would be useful for an organisation to define their own registry/code table so that it fits within their own business logic - particularly if for internal use only, and the data isn't necessarily going to be used by other orgs. So again, it may come back to the software, and the software administrator may have a deployment choice to make whether they want to use external registries, or whether they want to define and host their own internally.

Cheers Gavin



Sahana Eden
<http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/>

Sahana Eden S3XRC - how we handle exports in multiple formats
<http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/S3XRC> 

Sahana Eden S3XML On-the-fly Transformation
<http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/S3XRC/S3XML/Transformation>