Serialisation Annotations

This page includes a set of proposals for annotations for serialisation rules that can be used by the New ITS to support easier implementation of HL7v3 models. It is for discussion by MnM.

Serialization Model Annotation Rules

A set of annotations to RMIMs are proposed that describe some serialization rules. These are added in the form of textual RMIM "notes", that are saved into the MIF and can be interpreted by tools that come later in the message production process. (Ideally these serialization hints would be made in a fully graphical style, but this isn\’t achievable yet.)

Serialization rules available are

• Suppress a clone, RIM attribute or datatype attribute
• Rename a clone, RIM attribute or datatype attribute
• Collapse a clone into its parent

These operations can be local to the annotated clone, or can apply globally to the whole model.

An example annotation is : On a clone called ClinicalDocument: ITS:global.codeSystem.suppress;global.contextConductionInd=ccInd;ClinicalDocument=DischargeMessage

On a clone called recordTarget: ITS:recordTarget.collapse

The "ITS:" prefix indicates that this is special purpose comment. Semi-colons are used to separate multiple operations. The keywords "suppress" and "collapse" correspond to a request for that action on the attribute that comes before the dot eg recordTarget.collapse.