dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 15 February 2011 13:34, Jo Størset <storset@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Den 15. feb. 2011 kl. 18.40 skrev Bob Jolliffe:
>
>> Simple validation seems to work ok.  I get an "Aw, Snap! ..." when
>> posting twice with the same period but that is probably something you
>> are not catching yet.
>
> Should work now.
>
>> I don't agree with this.
>
> I know :) I don't necessarily agree myself, but it is also a matter of what is practically possible.. (And it might make sense to have a simpler json-oriented web api vs. a more fullfledged xml format for heavy imp/exp. Are you coming to Oslo in March by any chance, then we can fight it out! )

28 March - 8 April

By heavy I presume you mean bulk loading of data, bootstrapping,
importing from legacy systems etc.  For many of those scenarios csv is
maybe the best option anyway .. we do need to map out the use cases in
more detail than heavy vs mobile :-)

What I don't want to do is to impose "heaviness" requirements on your
lighter use cases and I don't see why this should be necessary. For
example you have defined a lightweight element, datavalueset, which
meets your requirement for exchange.  What I am suggesting is that we
should also define a compound element, dxf, which can allow
composition of these elements:

<dxf xmlns="http://dhis.org/schema/2.0";>
....
<dataValueSet>...</dataValueset>
...
</dxf>

None of which prevents you using dataValueSet on its own.  But we
really, really only want one place in dhis code where dataValue set is
marshalled/unmarshalled.  You are now the jackson expert, but it looks
from what I can see that this does a good job in doing that and
certainly easier to maintain than staxwax.

One thought which was raised by Lars on looking at the MS OOXML format
used by, for example, xlsx, is that for xml elements which are likely
to be exchanged in bulk, we should perhaps look at using abbreviated
element/attribute names.  So

<dataValueSet xmlns="http://dhis2.org/schema/dataValueSet/0.1";
   dataSet="EEEE2762-6432-4C9A-A739-8E7F1D74F60F"
   period="2011"
   orgUnit="59AC3C28-DDCE-435C-8695-8E457127DADC"
   storedBy="Bob">
 <dataValue dataElement="B01190B8-808C-42C4-AA6F-3F9CF51DC44F" >34</dataValue>
</dataValueSet>

becomes

<dvs xmlns="http://dhis2.org/schema/dataValueSet/0.1";
   ds="EEEE2762-6432-4C9A-A739-8E7F1D74F60F"
   p="2011"
   ou="59AC3C28-DDCE-435C-8695-8E457127DADC"
   s="Bob">
 <dv de="B01190B8-808C-42C4-AA6F-3F9CF51DC44F" >34</dv>
</dvs>

Though, ironically, this starts to get closer to the json
representation (which might well be more suitable for bulk transfer).
Anyway .. still busy with other things but we will talk.  Meanwhile
congrats on the "spike".  This is the kind of api we need.  But do try
to be a bit generous and think beyond your mobile use case :-)

Cheers
Bob

>
>> Your use of DataValueSet here is very welcome - as you know I have
>> been advocating this for a while.  Would be nice also to persist it to
>> provide audit (and simplify dtavalue store) but that is maybe too much
>> for now.
>
> Yes, that would have to be the next topic. Let's see if anyone else take the bait :)
>
> Jo