OpenMRS GSoC Project Introduction - my first online presentation

Just after the coding period began in GSoC, we in OpenMRS had our introduction presentations where each of the GSoC participant had to give a brief 10 minute introduction regarding our projects at the weekly OpenMRS Developers Forum. Since this was my first time, doing such kind of online presentation for an audience i was bit uncomfortable regarding this as well as excited too. However my mentor Mark was very helpful and he helped me to correct the content i am going to present, the things i am going to say etc.

There are few ways to connect to the Developers forum as Skype, Adobe Connect etc. and i was using Adobe Connect. Therefore it was not very hard to configure the settings where i did prechecking of my microphone,speakers etc. before the meeting and also before the meeting starts, some of us did test our microphones with voice. My slot was the last presentation of the schedule so by that time my fears were all gone and i was well relaxed. :D That is one remarkable experience in my GSoC memories and presenting my project into a new audience was really a great experience, as well as the support and help we got from the fellow OpenMRS community members!

I have also attached the slide i used to do the presentation, as there was specific information which needed to be mentioned there. Perhaps a future OpenMRS GSoC student may find it useful :)

Down the lane with OpenMRS in GSoC 2012-Part II

The next task i was assigned is,

2. Creating a new tag to restrict all (or part of) an HTML Form by role 


The <restrictByRole> tag is the next newcomer to the HTML tag base of Form Entry Module. This feature is concerned to be implemented in a way that, some user with a particular role can be restricted from either viewing a certain HTML form (or a section in the form) by using the <restrictByRole> tag. The tag comes with two attributes as "include" and "exclude" where you can mention the names of the roles for whom you want to include or exclude the form restriction.

As an example if you don't need to make a certain table in your HTML form to be viewable to a Person which has "Data Manager" role assigned to him/her, you form description would be as follows,

<restrictByRole include="Data Manager">                   
  <table>
   <tr>
       <obs conceptId="6100" labelText="Restricted for Data Manager"/>
   </tr>
  </table>
</restrictByRole>

So this table would not be shown to any person with the 'Data Manager' role but only to the users who belongs to that role.
In the same way this can be used with "exclude" attribute, in where the corresponding section would only be not restricted to the mentioned role.

An example form would be like,

1.0 These rows in the table are not restricted for the user Admin, who has "System Developer" role

2.0 If a user who is not a "System Developer" opens the form, if would look like this

That is where we are heading towards at the moment. There are two more tasks to do during the summer so i look forward for those also very enthusiastically!

Down the lane with OpenMRS in GSoC 2012 ..............

Time flows lot faster and i can't believe that it has almost come up the time for GSoC mid evaluations too.  I did have a quite busy but amazing time of two months so far with GSoC where it helped me to learn about many new things and technologies. So thought to have a little flashback on the things done so far.

The following are the tasks which i have already finished by the time of mid evaluation for this GSoC with HTML Form Entry module in OpenMRS.

1. Add autocomplete search functionality to encounter provider and encounter location widgets in HTML Form Entry

There are a lot of names as locations and encounter provider persons  in the system where it is displayed in a drop down list of options at the current module, but due to the long list of options it will be time taking to load and submit the location and provider values with the HTML form. 

At present, HFE module provides auto complete functionality with the <obs> tag, (stands for observation entries), where it does follows the JQuery AJAX calls to populate the source for the auto complete. However this feature is tightly coupled for Concept classes and ids, therefore it is not reusable for the Locations and Providers. The intention of my task is providing a generalized auto complete mechanism through out the module, which uses a pre-populated list of options as the source and which can be used with any other field (as DrugOrder etc.) in the future too. 

Encounter location and provider have been implemented by having two dedicated widgets for each such as, LocationWidget (for <encounterLocation>) and PersonStubWidget (for <encounterProvider>) tags. In addtion to that there is another encounter provider is introduced with htmlformentry 1.9 onwards which too uses a dedicated widget named ProviderWidget with <encounterProviderAndRole> tag. The intention of the task is replace the dedicated  widgets for location, provider etc. and implement a common auto complete mechanism over the Html Form Entry module by just using AutoCompleteWidget and the DropDownWidget for the fields. In that case when a user needs to add auto complete functionality into any other field, it can be easily done by using the new, generalized AutoCompleteWidget.

Here are few of the snapshots from new functionality!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And also it works with Options which has special characters like ã,é etc. and which have double quotes,single quotes in middle too :) Auto complete functionality is added into <encounterLocation>, <encounterProvider> and <encounterProviderAndRole> usingthe new AutocompleteWidget and LocationWidget and ProviderWidget in the module is replaced with the new AutocompleteWidget or a default DropDownWidget, hence they have been deprecated for future occurrences. 

The following is the link for the demonstration video i did regarding this new functionality at the second GSoC progress presentation at OpenMRS on 21st June 2012. The next post will explain the second task i have completed. I am eagerly waiting to see my changes have been integrated into HFE module soon :)

GSoC 2012 Autocomplete Demo

The presentation slides can be found Here!