Profile Tooling

This page gathers together links for tools that work with or on profiles for FHIR. Tools are categorised into several functional categories:

Editing / Authoring Profiles

The following choices exist for editing profiles

• By Hand
  • Use a schema drive editor against Profile.xsd in the FHIR schemas
  • start with an existing profile (look for the link under the structure definition on the page for the resource)
  • edit the profile as you see fit
  • Note: profiles are full rich description of the content, and so they're pretty hard to edit by hand. You an do this but it's not the intention

• From Spreadsheets
  • this is how some of the profiles in the specification are produced
  • use the FHIR Build Process following the method used here: FHIR Profile authoring

• Using Forge
  • see .. link to be provided...

Validating Resources against Profiles

You can validate a resource against a profile in several different ways

• use the web interface at http://fhir.healthintersections.com.au/open
  • find the profile on fhir.healthintersections.com.au server by searching through the profiles
  • if your profile isn't there, you can put it on the server - paste it into the edit box at the bottom of the page, check the operation is "transaction", and choose Upload
  • now, go back to fhir.healthintersections.com.au/open, paste your resource into the edit box at the bottom of the page, choose "validate" for the operation, and pick the relevant profile, and choose upload
  • get a list of errors
• You can use the [validation] interaction
  • use a RESTful client like [POSTman], or write code to do this in the background
  • post the resource as described by the validation operation, and tag it with the profile you wish it to be tested against
  • most servers require the profile to be hosted on the server itself
• You can use the validator package
  • This is a java jar that you can use to validate a resource
  • get the validator from the FHIR downloads page for the version of FHIR you are using- download the validation pack, and unzip it
  • run it like this: java -jar org.hl7.fhir.validator.jar [source] -defn [validation.zip] -profile [url]
    • [source] is a file name of the resource to validate, or a URL at which to find it
    • [validation.zip] is the file name of the file validation.zip included in the tool zip download from above
    • [url] - the file name or url of the profile to use when validating the resource. if this is not provided, the resource is validated against the base
• You can use the java classes directly
  • see the java package org.hl7.fhir.instance.validation in the [FHIR svn]
• The fhir.healthintersections.com.au source is available at [[1]]
  • this can used if desired

other tools to add: DotNet validator

Data Entry Tools

Resources are able to declare that they conform to a profile by being "tagged" with the URI that identifies the profile. The tags are moved as Atom category elements in a bundle, or in the category header in an HTTP call. This is an example profile tag in a bundle (e.g. Atom Feed):

 <category term="http://hl7.org/fhir/tag/message" label="Message" scheme="http://hl7.org/fhir/tag"/> 

And in the HTTP Headers:

  Category: http://hl7.org/fhir/tag/message; scheme="http://hl7.org/fhir/tag"; label="Message"

Note that just because a resource conforms to the rules of a profile, it is not guaranteed to actually conforms to it.

In order to be confident that the resource does conform, a user or application can ask a validation service to check that it does conform by:

• Using the validation service via browser at http://fhir.healthintersections.com.au/open#upload. Notes:
  • Choose Operation "Validation", and the profile you want to use
  • In order to use this, the profile must first be uploaded onto the server
• use the validation service via REST - post XML or JSON to
  • [base]/[type]/_validate
  • http://fhir.healthintersections.com.au/open is the base for one server that implements validation
• use the validation jar (see the [the download] for instructions)
• use the java classes directly (see the FHIR svn, see http://gforge.hl7.org/gf/project/fhir/)

Other validation libraries are planned, but not yet implemented