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Forge 19.4 for STU3

This release introduces a revamped main user interface.

FHIR API:

Update to FHIR .NET API 1.0.0-alpha3 (internal release)
See below for more details on this major update.

User Interface

  • NEW! Folder Explorer

    We have redesigned the main user interface and integrated a new Folder Explorer that provides a detailed overview of all profiles in a common project folder.

    Start by opening or creating a profile project folder on your machine. We recommended that you manage related profiles in separate dedicated project folders. Forge resolves profile dependencies, such as extensions, from the project folder. To ensure proper resolving, verify that the project folder does not contain any duplicates or backups of profiles, as this will cause resolving conflicts.

    The new Folder Explorer lists all FHIR conformance resources discovered in the project folder, showing both file attributes and FHIR metadata such as resource type, name and canonical url. You can easily browse, filter, sort and search the list for specific profiles. Open or derive from an existing profile, or create a new profile in the project folder. You can also import from and publish to projects on Simplifier.

    Optionally, Forge also indexes all subfolders of the working folder (recursively). This allows you to manage e.g. extensions and valuesets in separate subfolders. A checkbox "Include Subfolders" in the Open Folder dialog controls this behavior. Toggle the view mode of the Folder Explorer to easily navigate projects with subfolders. Do NOT enable subfolder indexing on deeply nested or mixed folders, such as My Documents.

    Visit our online documentation for more information about the new Folder Explorer.

    In following Forge releases, we are going to introduce the concept of a Forge project file. This will allow us to further improve the Forge user interface and smoothly integrate Forge projects with Simplifier.

  • NEW! Add Extension

    We also implemented a completely new user interface for managing profile extensions. The new extension selection dialog list all of the extension definitions discovered in the project folder, with core metadata such as title and canonical url. You can easily browse, filter, sort and search the list for specific extensions. Forge validates the extension context and restricts the selection to extensions that are compatible with the receiving profile element.

    Visit our online documentation for more information about the new extension selection dialog:

FHIR API

Ewout Kramer, maintainer of the FHIR .NET API, has rewritten significant parts of the API code base in order to introduce the new ElementModel classes.

The new ElementModel-based approach is highly flexible and facilitates dealing with possibly invalid or incompatible data in different representations and formats. The API now uses ElementModel internally to read and manipulate data.

This API release also introduces a new interface for flexible error collecting and reporting. Initially, the new interface is used internally by the new (de-)serialization logic. Future updates will further integrate the new interface with various other API services, such as the summary generator and snapshot generator. This will allow us to improve error handling and reporting in Forge.

The ArtifactSummaryGenerator classes extract some additional relevant metadata from profiles and extensions in your project folder, displayed by the Forge Folder Explorer.

The DirectorySource class now catches duplicate canonical url conflicts during resolving, without preventing access to other resources in the containing folder.

Features

  • New configuration option: UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) Previous versions would always save XML files in UTF-8 encoding with Byte Order Mark (BOM) prefix. Forge now provides a application configuration option to control the output format. Enable this option to include the Byte Order Mark in the output, or disable to suppress.

Bug fixes

  • Fix memory leaks Refactored significant parts of UI chrome to prevent databinding memory leaks.

  • Introduced some new bugs, as this is a huge rewrite... We welcome you to report issues at forge@fire.ly

Happy profiling!

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