dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Devs,
I have been working to document the Maintenance section of DHIS2, and
have a few observations and would like to have some feedback before I
file, what I think should be a blueprint.

One of my big complaints about DHIS2 is that it is exceedingly
difficult to simply browse data that has been entered. One can create
a report (rather painful) or use the data entry screens to browse
data, but this too seems a bit of a kludge, when I might just want to
simply quickly view data for a given orgunit/period/dataset
combination. This is a very common operation on the part of users. I
was expecting to find this in the "Data browser", however, this is not
exactly what the data browser does, as far as I can tell. The data
browser provides a summary of the data contained in the database,
providing the number of data element values that are present, and they
can be grouped a couple of different ways. I have reviewed the
/dhis2/dhis-2/dhis-api/src/main/java/org/hisp/dhis/databrowser/DataBrowserTable.java
and also crosschecked this against the screen found at
(http://dhis.uio.no/demo/dhis-web-maintenance-dataadmin/searchResult.action?periodTypeId=Monthly&fromDate=2009-04-01&toDate=2009-08-31&searchOption=DataSet).
This appears to be  a summary of the number of elements contained in a
given dataset for a given period interval. This is fine and quite
handy I guess.

Now, this is where things get tricky..

http://dhis.uio.no/demo/dhis-web-maintenance-dataadmin/searchResult.action?searchOption=DataSet&parent=233&periodType=Monthly&toDate=2009-08-31&fromDate=2009-04-01

provides a summary ( I think) of the number of data element values for
a given data element and period interval, which is also handy.

However, I feel this may be very misleading, because of the name "Data
browser". We are looking here at the "COUNT" of data element values,
not the "SUM" and not browsing the actual data values themselves. If
an untrained eye were to see the results of the URL above, it might be
very misleading.  I therefore would like to suggest that we come up
with a new name for the "Data browser", but I do not really know what
it should be called. I just think that it should be clear that we are
not actually browsing data, but rather looking at a summary (namely
the number of data element values) for a particular set of parameters.

Regardless of this, I think having the functionality to simply browse
raw data itself, without having to go either through a report, or data
entry form, would be very useful. I was planning to write this up as a
blueprint, but would appreciate some comments on what I have written
here first.

Best regards,
Jason