Datatypes R2 Issue 98

Introduction

At the moment, CE disallows qualifiers in the root, but not in translations. The idea is that the root code is always the "approved" code and that translations represent the original or other translations. Because the original or translations might need qualifiers they are supported.

There are two issues with this:

1. 1. However, the primary purpose of CE is for the convenience of use-cases where qualifiers are either not necessary or are not supported by the systems using the datatype. Disallowing qualifiers for the root but requiring their use in translations forces applications to support qualifiers when they support the datatype, whether they're allowed in the root or not.

1. 2. The root CANNOT always contain the 'preferred' code because a single instance may comply with multiple realms and/or multiple templates, each of which might define a different expectation for what value-set is 'preferred'. Every application will thus need to scan through the set of available codes (root and tranlsations) to find the one that fits a given specification against which the instance is being validated. This means that constraining the root doesn't mean you're constraining the preferred code, you're simply constraining one code among many. Doing so doesn't make sense

Discussion

If there is no agreement to remove qualifiers from all CE translations, then the CE type itself should be dropped, as it fulfills no purpose.

Links

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