Modify a Code

Now it’s time to satisfy our last requirement:

5. We need to use HL7 standard codes (“F”, “M” and “U”) for the ‘Sex’ field.

Using annotations to revisit the ‘Out’ variable’s node tree, you’ll notice that we have male represented as “male” and female as “female”. To correct this, we will use an if statement to substitute “F”, “M” or “U”. We will also copy the ‘Sex’ field into a variable to simplify this logic.

Add the following lines of code to your script:

What is happening here? We created the variable Sexto contain whatever value is currently stored in the message’s ‘Sex’ field (Out.PID[8]). We use the nodeValue() function to convert a leaf node value (in this case, the message’s ‘Sex’ field value) into a text value. We then plug the results into an if/else statement that checks for “male” and “female”, then returns “M”, “F” or “U” as needed.

Let’s examine the results! In the corresponding annotations, we can see that “female” has been changed to “F” successfully:

Sample Code

Here is a copy-and-paste version of the code so far:

function main(Data)
   -- (1) Parse the HL7 message
   local Msg, Name = hl7.parse{vmd = 'demo.vmd', data = Data}
   local Out = hl7.message{vmd = 'demo.vmd', name = Name}

   -- (2) Map the incoming message to the outgoing message
   Out.MSH:mapTree(Msg.MSH)
   Out.PID:mapTree(Msg.PID)

   -- (3) Alter the MSH segment data
   Out.MSH[3][1] = "First Steps"
   Out.MSH[4][1] = "Administration"
   trace(Out) 

   -- (4) Modify the PID data
   -- modify sex coding to use HL7 standard codes "M", "F", & "U"
   local Sex = Out.PID[8]:nodeValue()
   if Sex == 'female' then
      Out.PID[8] = 'F'
   elseif Sex == 'male' then
      Out.PID[8] = 'M'
   else
      Out.PID[8] = 'U' -- Unknown
   end

   -- (5) Push the outgoing message into the Iguana queue
end

The last thing we need to do to create a working channel is to push the data onto the Iguana Queue.