Re: [Gnumed-devel] demographics.sql

[Horst Herb]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 13:54, Ian Haywood wrote:
> or can org and identity share a common ancestor?

Is there need to?
"Address" is an independent entity, which is used by both "natural" and 
"organisational" identities
Only "natural identities" have a gender and a date of birth, but both have a 
name.


> 2/ Numbers, such as "Medicare number", "provider number, etc." Obviously
> totally locale and context specific. In the backend and business layer its
> easily to generalise like we do with comms channels, but difficult at the
> GUI level.
> Should we have
> if locale == "AU"
> ......
> elif locale == "DE":
> ....

This is why we designed the user interface as modular plug-in architecture; 
usually, you want to write a whole different widget for locale dependent 
issues. It even goes beyond country dependent entities (such as medicare 
number) right down to the on-screen placement of widgets and the tab order:
E.g: in Germany, you would always type in the postcode first, then the town - 
but the street name first, and then the street number. Exactly opposite as 
you would do in most anglosaxon countries.

Hence, I believe that it is easier to maintain a plurality of country specific 
user interface mega-widgets rather than generalizing one too much and making 
nobody happy.

Horst