Week 10

Hi all,

Its now the end of week 10 since the program started.  Incase you missed out last week's feed, you could want to check it out here .

Work done this week.

For this week, I have been working on a few Tickets. These are all about Mapping Patient metadata in a MergeAble format. I finished work on  Mapping Concepts,  OBS and Encounters  now am assembling everything to get sense out my work. In a nutshell, am now using the Mapping to add support for Encounters.

Challenges Encountered.

In every development stage, there are always challenges and its those challenges that make one learn.

Handling database Table Ids for Merged Data 😕 

For instance we have two servers ie:- Server A and B. A has 50 patients while B has 5 Patients. Regardless of the DBMS, Every row needs an Id. Well while merging data, we could want to merge a Patient from the last row of server A to B. Let me assume that the Patient has an Id of 50. When this Patient is merged, the Patient in Server B may look something like below

Id	patient_name
5	Male Samuel
6	Kenny
7	Kaddu Ronnie
8	Another One
9	Some Patient
50	From Server A

Like you can see, it looks dirty within the database.

Proposed Solution

We could first make first make a check to the database to see whether the Patient we are trying to Merge already exists or not, if it exists, the update it otherwise set the id to null and register it as a new Patient. For a few metadata, this is simple but with other metadata like Encounters, Obs, Locations and Concepts that reference the original Patient id it becomes hard to handle this. You could want to advise me on this modal. Please leave a comment of advice.

Regards,

Samuel Male