Thursday, June 12, 2008

Mocking Up the ODA GUI and Adding Token Search

I've been spending time getting more familiar with various components like the Logic Service API (still not working for me) and playing with the data export tool to get a feel for the different types of data that one would want to search for.

I spent some time creating an initial mock-up of the ODA GUI based on the functionality we're wanting to add:


One of the new features is that of adding modifiers to individual tokens. The user can select individual "Selected Tokens" and add and play with Modifiers for each token in the bottom window. Perhaps the "Last" modifier should be selected by default so that the data returned is current patient data by default. Maybe the Modifier section could even be hidden by default and the user can activate it by clicking "Advanced" mode or something similar.

The other new functionality shown in the mock-up on the third "row" is that of the ability for a user to search amongst the available tokens. In an effort to learn SWT, which is the graphics technology used to create the ODA GUI, I implemented a search with the existing BIRT ODA:


You can see on the bottom of the GUI that the search for "DATE" populated the tokens list with all tokens that contained the string "DATE". I didn't spend much time on how and where the search was actually layed out because this will most likely change, but I learned a lot on how to work with SWT. It also took a lot more time than I thought to implement something that seems so simple :) I also reorganized the GUI code some so it's easier to visualize the flow of how things are setup.