Re: [Gnumed-devel] lab data fetcher/importer connection methods

[Karsten Hilbert]

Let's see:

- lab would need to agree on a key with each practice
- lab would need to know an email address per practice
- lab would send lab results as an encrypted email to that address

- practice would fetch email by whatever means
  - manually with email client
  - with dedicated email fetcher such as fetchmail

Now the encrypted lab result is a file on your machine.

The encrypted lab result (which likely was an attachment) is
fed to a decryptor.

The decrypted file is put into a directory for the first-stage
importer to pick up.

All this can be scripted to be done automatically:

lab
-> encrypts file
-> mails file to mail server

practice
-> fetches (fetchmail) from mail server
-> feeds (procmail) it to encryptor (...)
-> which feeds it (saves as file) to importer
-> imports (called by cron) into GnuMed

Feeding/passing can be done file-based such that if the chain
breaks at any step you'll end up with the file at that stage
and can simply restart the chain with that file at the
appropriate point. IOW manual and scripted steps are
combinable as needed. That is the beauty of the simplicity of
email.

> I appreciate that userids and passwords could be written into (e.g.) 
> a shell script, however the package being run to fetch the mail would 
> presumably need to have "hooks"(?) by which the userid and password 
> could be issued from the shell.
userid/pw would need to be put into the config file for the
mail fetcher

> And before it can be imported into gnumed, a script (maybe cronned?) 
> would have to look for and find new contents within a lab results 
> directory, running any files that were present against OSS tools to 
> process the content. Maybe the output is tidily written into a 
> different directory, for a gnumed lab importer to poll?
roughly like that, yes

Karsten
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