SQL on FHIR WG Meetings
SQL on FHIR WG Meeting — March 25, 2024
Mar 25, 2024

Topics discussed:

  • A first pass at a shareable ViewDefinition profile was merged. It's a profile of the ViewDefinition logical model that promotes the FHIR version, the URL, the name and every column's type from optional to required — the minimum for a view meant to travel between runners rather than be run once locally and thrown away.
  • Alongside it, a second profile for views where every item produced is a non-repeated scalar value — which is what lets a result drop straight into a CSV, and into plenty of other tabular formats besides. The name isn't settled: "tabular", "scalar only" and "CSV mode" have all been used, and CSV mode was called compelling but in need of something more official. A view can be both shareable and tabular, since these are ordinary FHIR profiles.
  • The existing examples don't implement either profile, so an example that actually does was flagged as the next step — otherwise the profiles are described in the spec but never demonstrated.
  • The test report page is showing real implementations with green check marks rather than just the reference implementation, and clicking a result jumps through to the implementation behind it.
  • Two items rolled over: whether a ViewDefinition can target multiple resource types, deferred until more of the group is on the call, and early exploration of a visual designer for ViewDefinitions, on the grounds that there's a lot of structure available straight from the resource definitions to drive it.