dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Lars Helge Øverland <larshelge@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jason


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Jason Pickering <
jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Lars,
> This has never been an issue before. It has only recently ( I think in
> 2.11) been noticed. Perhaps it has just gone undetected until now.
>
> I guess what is really puzzling is that it "seems" work fine for the new
> PivotTables. Anything which depends on the datamart does not work, so the
> logic does not seem to be consistent. What I mean my "seems", is that I
> have not confirmed in the values which appear in the analytics actually sum
> to what they "should", in this case that the weekly and monthly values
> should be summed. There of course could be other situations (similar to the
> "Aggregation levels") in which weekly data (higher frequency) and monthly
> data (lower frequency) data should not be summed at all (which does not
> seem to be accounted for).
>
> I guess what I am missing really is the relationship between a dataset and
> a data value, and perhaps  a data element. One could think of a data
> warehousing situation when in fact there is not a dataset for a data
> element, unless this is implicitly required (as is perhaps indicated with
> the Data Integrity checks?) Perhaps it is never entered through the data
> entry screen at all, but simply imported from an external system.
>


I remember there was a long discussion about this some years ago about
whether to define collection frequency explicitly for each data element or
implicitly through data set associations. The advantages of the latter are
that data elements are not directly coupled with the frequency they are
collected, and that this model itself allows for multiple capturing
frequencies. The downside is like you point out that there has to be data
sets for data elements, even if they are not collected through DHIS 2. So
we went for the latter with these in mind.


> One could also think of situations where data elements are recorded at
> different frequencies. This is exactly what is happening here in Zambia,
> where certain data elements are reported weekly on some datasets,
> and monthly in others. In this case, they are for different orgunits,
> whereby certainly orgunits report weekly and others report monthly.
>
>
Yes and we admittedly don't support this well. Of course it could be done,
but it would be complex. The issue is still that we cannot allow
disaggregation. So if a branch of the org unit tree captures something
weekly while the rest captures monthly, then we could produce weekly
reports for org units within that branch, but not outside it. Something to
consider.

Lars