Concept "version" property

Development
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1

As a side discussion to migrating-pih-dictionary-to-ocl, one piece of data that I have found is not being migrated successfully in our OCL tests, is concept.version.

I take this as a side topic, as I don’t really know what concept.version has ever really represented in OpenMRS, and I don’t know that it has ever been used meaningfully for anything. At PIH I don’t believe we have anything that relies (or even is aware) of the existence of this property on Concept. So I don’t really know that anyone cares if this property is successfully migrated or not. But they might. If they do, we should create tickets to:

  • Update the OCL importer to save this into the extras field (or somewhere appropriate) on an OCL concept
  • Update the openconceptlab module to populate the Concept with this field if present.

It also occurs to me that it might be worth thinking as to whether this property might start becoming more valuable or useful for storing the version of a concept that is created from OCL, since OCL does have very strong notions of versioning, and each imported concept does have a very specific version.

@burke do you have a sense of whether/how this version has property has ever been used or was intended to be used?

2

Concept versions are useful for OCL to track changes just like git tracks commits. For dictionary management in OpenMRS, I think versioning is more useful at the dictionary level.

3

@burke does that mean you think we should deprecate this property and explicitly not support retaining it’s existing values in a move to OCL-managed Concepts? Because currently this version property is not getting imported into OCL, and not getting read back from OCL into an OpenMRS dictionary.

4

I’m curious if anyone is using it.