Strategies to make it easy to test HL7 interfaces

Say you have a text file with a bunch of HL7 messages. Each segment ends with \r. And each message ends with \r\n. Here’s the file attached:

You could use the simulator component - but honestly it’s probably easier to write you own little component.

Use a custom field for the input file name

See Custom Fields Here we use ~/test.txt for the default location of the input file.

You access that with:

local FileName = component.fields()

Read in the file using the FIL library with FILread

The FIL library makes it really easy to inhale the file:

local Content = FILread("main.lua");

Examine the file contents in the translator - each segment ends in \r but the message ends with \n characters

We can easily see by looking at the contents of the file using the Escaped Text mode:

that have a custom field for filename, can read in the messages, split them and push them into a queue.

Then it’s super easy to push test data into your interfaces from that - more straightforward that other techniques.