Update OpenMRS completely damaged my personal concept dictionary

Implementing
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Hi Everyone.

In the last 4 days I shut down my Tomact server to do maintenance tasks in my OpenMRS implementation, I updated referenceaplication to 2.10, platform to 2.3 and some modules I had outdated, like addresshierarchy to 2.12.0 and htmlformentry to 3.10.0.

Checking that function by function everything was fine, I found that some forms gave me an error when opening them. I investigated my dictionary of concepts and, for some reason, 249 of my concepts have been updated by concepts of OpenMRS with Covid-19 data.

I understand that you want to help with this type of concepts to the current world situation, but with this you have also damaged 249 concepts that I have created during these 2 years, along with the HTML forms and reports attached to these concepts.

I don’t need help to restore them, fortunately I have a backup of the database and I am recovering the damaged, but, this kind of changes should be different. Add in another concept number that has not been used or at least a warning before updating.

Now I will be very careful with the updates, moreover, I think I will never update again.

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i can identify all the concepts with changed by 1 and date_changed on march

I hope this serves as a warning to someone who has enough concepts in their dictionaries, like me.

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It looks like COVID-19 concepts were introduced to the Reference Metadata module.

@dkayiwa, am I correct in assuming the Reference Metadata module is meant for supplying default metadata for the Reference Application and/or running the Reference Application with demo data? Certainly, implementers upgrading their systems shouldn’t have Reference Metadata running and overwriting concept by internal concept ID.

/cc @mozzy, @herbert24

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Yes you are correct.

The reference application has not yet played well with custom concepts. @willa got into some sort of a related problem here: Concept Dictionary Changes When Upgrading from 1.11.6 to Refapp 2.8.0

@ssmusoke uses some bit of hack to workaround it for UgandaEMR

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@burke @akanter This is a very bad decision IMO, the COVID concepts do not belong in Reference Application, rather they should be part of a custom module and distribution focused on the COVID response, otherwise it ties OpenMRS to COVID, yet there is more to OpenMRS base usage than COVID. This is a similar approach that I recommended for disease specific and vertical distributions on top of RefApp

@elkinleon this will however happen whenever you upgrade Ref App due to the concepts that are dependent on the numeric IDs. I would suggest you increment the numeric IDs of all concept related tables by 5000000 (Five Million) before you start creating custom concepts.

I have a blog post coming this week that details this approach

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thanks @ssmusoke, i will do that!

Thanks to @burke and @dkayiwa to clarify and help to understand what happened.

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We definitely need a way to integrate OCL more into these releases so that folks have a more robust way to handle custom concepts and integration of CIEL/Ref App content…

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I will bring this up in other venues as well (and I did already here on Slack), but IMO we need to work on deprecating the Reference Metadata module.

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Just me thinking out aloud on OCL, would it not be more efficient to build a new toolchain from the ground up with the latest Python/Django as the current one seems to be dragging along

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@elkinleon as promised An Opinionated Approach to OpenMRS Concept Management

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