Basic Tutorial

Create Patient - The scenario

We are building a healthcare application, and one of the first element to create is a Patient with some vital infomration like name, national insurance numnber (num), sex and date of birth.

##Purpose

This tutorial helps you to start using CRISTAL-iSE as quickly as possible. It will guide you through the steps of creating your first Items.

##Prerequisite

To get started first you need to follow the Getting Started document to intsall a CRISTAL-iSE server with these 5 modules: kernel, ldap, xmldb, gui and dev

##Description-Driven building blocks

In a development environment like Rails, which is based on the Model-View-Controller paradigm, you create a class to store your model data, which will create the corresponding database table. In CRISTAL-iSE this is done rather differently, because it implements the Description-driven approach.

In CRISTAL-iSE everything is orchestrated by a Workflow which defines the business process (so called LifeCycle), the list of operations of your business object, in this case the Patient. A single operations or command on that object (Patient), is represented by an Activity. That Activity provides the so called Outcome, an XML document, which is (sub)set of business data to be collected for the business object (Patient). All these are groupped together by the Item to manage Activity execution and data collection consistently.

There are 2 groups of Items you need to manage for a working system: Description and Instance Items. First of all you need to create the Desciption Items to manage the definition of your business processes and objects. For this tutorial it will be called as PatientDescription Item. This Item will hold the Workflow, Activity, Outcome and Property descriptions and it will be able to create new PatientInstance Items. You will use and manage this

If you want to read more about these concepts, please raad the Technical Introduction and the The CRISTAL-iSE API documents.

These are the steps to create all the 4 Items required for the tutorial

1. Create PatientDetails Schema Item
2. Create SetPatientDetails Activity Description Item
3. Create PatientLifecycle CompositeActivity Description
4. Create PatientDescription Item