It occurred to me recently that with the evolution of OCL, and the current OCL for OpenMRS app that is being developed, that we might be at a point where form designers might be built out that don’t require an OpenMRS back-end at all to develop.
Has any thought been given (eg. by the Bahmni team for Bahmni forms or the AMRS team for json forms) to develop form designers that connect directly via REST to OCL rather to a particular OpenMRS instance?
@angshuonline or @darius - now that we have successfully confirmed we can use Bahmni form controls in a non-Bahmni-based system, I’m curious how big of a lift it would be to evolve the Bahmni Form Designer such that it could pull available Concepts in from OCL rather than a particular Bahmni / OpenMRS instance, and could just run as a standalone OWA with minimal dependencies.
In fact a limitation of the approach we’re taking with the “OCL for OpenMRS” idea (moving terminology management from the local server to the cloud) is that it’s going to make it harder to create a form that requires new concepts.
We haven’t done any thinking about this from the OCL side, but it’s definitely desirable.
Is your idea that you can design a form based on OCL concepts anywhere (e.g. on some dev server) and then export it for use in a production server (but this would also require pulling in the concepts if they’re not there)? Or are you thinking of a design tool that will also import concepts on the fly if you try to use them?
@darius, initially I’m thinking that pulling in concepts is a separate step from authoring the form that depends on them. But I’m assuming that most implementations in the future will move to a model where all of their concepts are managed in OCL and are available under a particular Collection or Organization, and they develop an approach for getting those Concepts into their distribution (either via OCL subscription or simply using the latest CIEL, etc). One could imagine a model where the form designer simply works off a file saved to the local dev server as you suggest. I’m guessing this would be the most straightforward version 1. One could also imagine these form designs also being saved somewhere to the a hosted service in some way (whether this is OCL, Github, or some other thing).