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This is the documentation for QuickViewHL7 release 1.3.3101 (June 2008)
A standard installer is used (NSIS) which behaves much as you would expect. The application appears to install and run on Windows x64 as well as those old-fashioned win32 systems.
The installer does not assign file associations, you should do this manually if you want to make QuickViewHL7 the default application for opening .HL7 files. In Windows Explorer go to Tools/Folder Options and File Types to create or change .HL7 file associations.
The application will recognize a single file pathame as a command-line argument, the named file will be opened and the Folder View will be set to show the folder containing the file.
The standard menu option File/Open File can be used to look up a folder and select a file. The default file type is *.HL7, but you can change this to *.TXT or *.* to access files with other extensions.
Alternatively, the Folder View can be used to select files from a specific folder. Once you have defined your Message Buckets these will be available in a select list on the Folder View panel. You may select a bucket name in the list or select the (Selected Folder) option to choose another folder. The Folder View will be populated with all files in the selected folder that appear to have HL7 content.
Simply click on a file in the Folder View to open that file in the main view. If you have edited the file that is currently loaded, the application will prompt you to save your changes when you click in the Folder View to open another file.
The menu item File/Tools opens the Tools window. This currently only has one active feature, the Message Buckets configuration panel.
This is fairly basic, you can create a list of named folders, which are the places you keep your HL7 test files. If you select one as the Default Startup Location, then whenever you open QuickViewHL7 without a startup filename, the default bucket will be selected and displayed in the Folder View.
These locations can then be selected in the Folder View, and are presented as optional locations when you select File/Save As.
The menu item View/Folder View shows and hides the Folder View panel. The options File names only and File summary list change the way files are displayed in the Folder View. You can drag the bottom edge of the Folder View panel to change its height - note you can also use the menu option File/Settings/Save window layout to save the window size, position and size of the Folder View panel, as the default layout at startup.
The currently opened file has its full pathname displayed at the top of the message display area. The segments are loaded into the tree-view as top-level nodes. Each node in the tree displays a reference to the segment, field, repeat index, and component index, as applicable. This is followed by the raw data for the element. Expand a node to get a breakdown of the element.
When you select an element in the tree-view and there is schema documentation available for it, the documentation will be displayed in the info panel at the the bottom of the window. This is fairly basic at this stage, but could be expanded on in the future if people find this feature useful.
Right-click on any node in the tree-view to get a context-menu, which has options to Edit or Copy the element data. Copy just puts the data from the selected element in the clipboard. The Edit option, when available, opens a very basic text editing box.
Double-clicking an element on the tree view has two different actions: if the element has child elements, double-click toggles the node open or closed. If the element has no children, double-click will open the edit box for that element.
Be careful how you use message delimiter characters when editing, I have allowed total freedom in what can be done here, e.g. you can insert or remove field-markers, repeat-markers and component-markers, allowing you to add or remove elements, thereby moving other elements out of their correct position. However, you can not insert or delete segments, for now. Those functions have not yet been added.
Note, when editing an element that contains repeat-markers, the text edit box will show a line break after each repeat-marker. You can also break lines using ctrl-enter, if it helps with editing large text strings. The line breaks will however be stripped from the value when it is saved back into the segment.
After you have edited an element in the file, an indicator will show that changes have been made to the file. This is a blue 'Save Changes' label, to the left of the file name. You can save the file by clicking on this indicator label, by pressing Control+S, or via the menu options File Save or File Save As. If you attempt to open another file without saving your changes, you will be prompted to save the changes first; select Yes to save, No to discard changes, or Cancel to cancel the action you have just taken and keep the current file loaded.
This started out as an idea, staggered on to become a learning exercise in XML, and made it as far as being a hint of a feature-to-come in QuickViewHL7. The current state of things is, XML files may be created for each segment type (formatted as per installed examples) and when a segment is selected in the viewer the associated segment and field details will be dislayed.
The file name consists of the segment type followed by either the keyword 'base' or an HL7 event-code, e.g. PID_base.xml or PID_I12.xml (for a REF^I12 message type). If a schema file is found for the current message event type and the selected segment, then it will be used, otherwise the program looks for the segment type followed by 'base'.
There is obviously more work to be done in this area, and I may build in a documentation editor to make this easier to maintain. It could also be useful to develop some method for distributing and sharing the documentation files between users.
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