NHS Booking and Referral Standard

Guide v1.8.0 | Core v1.1.4 | Package v1.33.0

Processing Requests

For GET requests (reads) the receiver honours what is being asked for by generating and synchronously sending a response, for example the server Capability Statement on a GET /metadata request. Any failure during processing must initiate an error response back to the Sender.

The $process-message endpoint on the implemented API supports a mix of RESTful and Messaging exchanges, as required by BaRS. The main benefit of introducing messaging is to allow a sender to package up the information a receiver needs, to process a particular request, but letting them handle it as necessitated by their system, rather than a sender having to make numerous requests to REST endpoints to perform the same action.

When a request is received against the $process-message endpoint, the MessageHeader resource must be examined to determine what process the sender is expecting the receiver to perform. There are three key elements to determine this -

  • Event - primary function being asked to perform, for example: booking-request or servicerequest-request
  • Reason - operation, for example:. New or Update
  • Focus - the key resource in the bundle, to be read first to make sense of other related resources

The receiver interprets the request, engages the processing and synchronously feeds back a response.

Please see the Standard Patterns for generic guidance for processing messages.


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