Re: [Gnumed-devel] Possible failure of GNUmed to void duplicate values on a key

[Busser, Jim]

On 2013-05-16, at 9:29 AM, Karsten Hilbert <address@hidden> wrote:

>> How can we achieve a constraint where an identifier that is supposed to be 
>> unique to a person
>> is not assigned to a second person?
> 
> That can be achieved by making the constraint unique to the whole table
> rather than to the patient column within. IOW by leaving out the fk_identity
> from the constraint. Then, no identifier can be assigned to several
> patients.
> 
> Karsten

(I have redirected this from gnumed-bugs to gnumed-devel)

A decision to do this in the GNUmed schema would make it all-or-none.

Doing so would be my preference, because I have no need to apply the same 
identifier to multiple distinct persons.

I can see a problem, however, if for example the members of a family shared 
(for example) one insurance "account", even though there may be a way around 
that, for example most insurers assign sub-numbers (dependent numbers) within 
the family where 01 is the primary account holder and the spouse is 02 and the 
children 03 and so on.

Therefore I would prefer that we go ahead, because it is currently too easy in 
GNUmed to create duplicate people.

-- Jim