dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings.  I am busy trying to implement concept mapping of
categories and groupsets in dhis and looking for some input from our
wide and varied experience.  The reason being that I want to assemble
some pre-defined core concepts to make it easier for users to start
(re)configuring a system.

For example, one concept which is essential is the UNCLASSIFIED
concept.  When an existing database is loaded then obviously none of
the existing categories or categoryoptions will be classified.  And
all constraints must be relaxed on these, meaning that any
unclassified categoryoption may be used in any unclassified category.
(Abyot this should make you happy - if you choose not to classify
anything then you are effectively back to your free-for-all
situation).

But there are three significant advantages in classifying these
things, eg flagging age related categories and categoryoptions with
the AGE_GROUP concept.
(i)   user interface simplification.  when picking categoryoptions to
assign to a category tagged as AGE_GROUP, ui should only present
AGE_GROUP categoryoptions
(ii)  pivot table reports - by using the concept as column name rather
than the category name(s) we can group all the under 5's, regardless
of the category which collected this information.  (Also we can
specify 'safe' column names).
(iii) we can explicitly specify dimensions of data for import/export purposes

So implementoers will be encouraged to set about classifying their
existing categories, categoryoptions and groupsets.

I want to provide a set of built in concepts to make the process a bit
easier.  This is not meant to be an exhaustive list.  The user can
always add concepts, but these are meant to be a pre-primed
'starter-pack'.  I can think of a few obvious ones I have come across,
like:
AGE_GROUP
SEX (or GENDER?)
DISEASE
PREGNANCY_STATUS
STOCK
LOCATION (this one is a bit wide covering things like in-patient,
out-patient, in community etc.  better suggestions welcome)
OWNERSHIP
FACILITY_TYPE

Note the last two are more commonly associated with orgunit groupsets
than categories.  Can I ask people to look at the dimension headers of
pivot tables they might have, review the list I have above and send me
suggestions for additional concepts which occur frequently?

Thankss
Bob