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...

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