Reference - general discussion

[niquola]

Almost everybody agrees that refs should be pre-parsed into some kind of id/resourceType for easier joins. The question is in detail:

• Use id or reference.id or something else - Reference - id conflicts #10
• Use type or resourceType - Reference - resourceType or type #11
• How to deal with external references by url - Reference - resource in another system (full URL) #12
• How to deal with refs by identifiers - Reference - identifiers #13
• How to provide context-free backward transformation
• How to deal with ids from multiple sources - hashing trick by @gotdan

Starting proposal is

resourceType: Encounter
patient:
  reference 'Patient/pt-1'

resourceType: Encounter
patient:
  reference: .....
  type: Patient
  id: pt-1
  

[niquola]

patient:
     @id: 'pt1'
     type: 'Patient'

[niquola]

If we use type and id we clash with id, but json is still valid FHIR and this is a good property! Can we estimate how often id is used in references?

[venkyvb]

Not sure if there is an existing proposal to handle logical references. I see that an issue was created but has been closed.
One option I have been thinking is to allow alternative identifiers (e.g. sof_logical_identifiers either as an array or an extracted values) as well as a part of the schema (potentially using hashing approach) so that look-ups/joins can be done better. Thoughts ?

[niquola]

Do you mean to generate an array of strings like sof_identifier: ['system|value', 'system|value'] ?

[jmandel]

Are we leaving versioned references (e.g., a reference to Patient 123 at version 5) out of scope?

[niquola]

Any suggestions on how to handle it? reference.sof_version?