Re: [Gnumed-devel] Time for a major re-think in 2005 - opinions please.

[Hilmar Berger]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 00:01:59 +0100
Karsten Hilbert <address@hidden> wrote:

> > That's the basic idea of the drug browser that is
> > already existing in the Gnumed and has basic functionality with
> > the german AMIS database. All it needs to connect other
> > backends is to write drivers for them (and overhaul the design
> > a bit).
> Does it offer the option to "drive" other DB frontends ? Eg.
> jump the user to that frontend, perhaps calling up a given
> drug, waiting for the user to finish whatever business she had
> within that foreign frontend and continue working with the
> results passed back by that frontend ?
Right now this option is missing. From which part of gnumed should this "jump" 
be initiated ? From a prescription plugin or from the drug browser plugin 
itself ? In the former case, we will need some code that takes drug names or 
parts of that, passes those to some drug DB (internal and external) and returns 
a list of selected drugs. For the latter, I will just have to change the 
interal DrugBrowser plugin to call a preconfigured external program. In that 
case I don't believe that it makes much sense to enter drugs in the gnumed 
plugin and show the results there afterwards. You probably want something like 
a button (or notebook label) you click to take you to the external software. 

So there are two scenarios (as you already mentioned in your former mail):
1. lookup a drug in prescription context (passing and returning drug names etc.)
2. lookup a drug outside prescription context (pass name, return nothing)

The first one needs mainly an interface between prescription plugin and any 
kind of drug DB. The latter needs some quick hack if you want to call an 
external program (and a decision where to put the "Drug Info" button). To 
lookup other data like AMIS or Drugref from within Gnumed, the infrastructure 
is there and must be extended by specific drivers to access more backends (e.g. 
XMLRPC for drugref).

Hilmar



> 
> Karsten
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