Monday 16 September 2013

Pencils Down Week

Hi Everyone :-)

This might be the last blog post regarding the work done in GSOC 2013 , Not that the work is going to stop :-)

First of all sorry for the delay of the blog post, It has been a hectic week! And well to speak officially my coding must stop today! except for some scrubbing and small changes.

Well, it had been a great summer for me , for i have learned things that i wouldn't have if i had been working in a corporate office. I can openly declare that what i have learned this summer is more than what i have learned my whole undergrad life. And i must thank all of this to my mentor Roger Friedman.

You might wonder what i have gained so much in these three months that i consider more than my engineering study! I agree in theory what we learn in college cant be compensated but, what I've learned here in these three months is more of a practical learning which i consider more important. So below is the list of things I've learned and gained this summer.

-->Spring 3.0
-->Hiberenate
-->Maven
-->Openmrs Architecture
-->Jquery
-->Portlets
-->Git
-->Coding Conventions
-->Information Exchange Standards in the Health Domain(SDMX-HD)
-->Internationalization
-->Presentation skills
-->OpenMRS module structure
-->Importance of right tools in the health care domain(DHIS)
-->Working towards a Solution
-->Importance of open source contribution

Finally, but the most important of all :

-->Roger (My Mentor,I will be grateful to this person my whole life)
-->A Community,Special mention : Daniel Kayiwa, Jeremy Kieper, Mike Seaton(they helped me with the problems I've faced this summer and helped me code better).

Some of you might wonder why do i mention things other than software, well these things matter and will play a major part in a person's life, in my opinion the things that i learned other than software are the ones that will be shaping my life. How? I would be doing my masters next fall and it would most likely be in Health Domain or in Computer Science with a health domain side option :-) Thank you OpenMRS and Thank you Roger. I will be contributing to the OpenMRS community in whatever way possible and encouraging my fellow mates to participate in OpenMRS.

Now, Getting back to the work aspect of the blog:

As far as the calls with Roger, well, we'd been having chats and calls daily and there was a day when we had to work 10 hours straight!

And the work completed this week :

1)Location Mapping Page

2) Results History Page

3) Run Reports Page

4) Report Parameters Mapping Portlet

5)Solved Git conflicts that had been hindering the project's progress

6)OpenmrsDhisObject


The Project is not yet release ready. But we are planning to release it in a couple of weeks.

It been an evolving project from the start when we only knew the what was needed -- a way to integrate Dhis and OpenMRS in a way that would be the simplest to the user and would require his minimal involvement. Just to indicate how evolving it has been, it was envisioned to do this project SDMX-HD was a main part of it, i.e the way in which the data would be exchanged , but later through investigation it was found that the main focus must be on making it simpler for the user rather than to focus on the exchange format.

You might ask how user friendly is this compared to the other modules that exist because there are other modules that does the integration.I'll list out the prominent features of this module:

All the user needs to know in the OpenMRS environment to be able to use this module

1.Creating Cohorts
2.Mapping the Cohorts(Selecting the appropriate cohort from a drop down for a Data Element* and Category Option*)(* being DHIS Terminology)
3.Running the Report(Clicking on the play and Entering the Parameters for the Report like start date and location)

How is Our module different in terms of functionality :
 (1) Support for multiple servers
 (2) Downloading of metadata(of the respective server)
 (3) Using cohorts rather than SQL queries as what user has to create
 (4) Completely compatible with Reporting Module (OpenMRS)

Thank you for following my post :-)

Friday 6 September 2013

31st August to 6th September

Calls With Roger:

Had a discussion with Roger daily mainly regarding the Design of Reporting Part and integration problem that was interrupting the work after the integration of code. And others were status update. Worked together to understand the Reporting module's behavior.

Work Done this Week :

1) Reverted the code back to the previous version to resolve the integration issues, and Integrated parts of code necessary.

2) Resolved the wiring issues and cleaned up the xmls and converted everything to be according to the spring version 3.0

3) Designed the Reporting Integration.

4)Started work on the resultHistory.jsp .

5)Solved the UI issues mentioned in the last week's blog.