How soon will FireKit support version STU3 of FHIR?

[qcastellanos]

Hi Ryan,

My team would like to leverage FireKit on our project but need to support STU3. I noticed that your README states that "An STU3 version for Swift 3.1 should be coming soon-ish". Is this still the case and if so, when do you think it will be available?

Thanks,
Quyen Castellanos
quyen.castellanos@parivedasolutions.com

[ryanbaldwin]

Hi Quyen!

Thanks for your interest. I'm hoping to get on this sooner rather than later, and really what it requires from me is two things:

1. Energy level after I spend all day developing software at work, and
2. Getting the various FHIRDate, FHIRTime, DateTime working so that they actually make sense (currently it's nearly impossible to query FHIR objects in Realm based on date-time because I did a naive job of porting those from Pascal's SwiftFHIR).

My goal over the coming couple weeks is to

1. Get point realm-primary-keys: PrimaryKeys are now pk instead of id #2 addressed, and
2. Just naively run the generator against the STU3 JSON specs and see what happens.

In theory, I believe, item #2 should work just peachy (according to James Agnew, anyways... we will see).

Apart from that I'll need to start gearing up for Swift 4 but I'm waiting for now.

TL;DR (though you likely already read my ramblings) - you've lit a fire under my ass and I'll see what I can do over the next couple weeks 😉 This has been an interesting exercise, Realm'izing FHIR.... it's good for some things, mediocre-to-bad for others, but overall I'd rather have this than not when working on a project.

[ryanbaldwin]

Hi Quyen,

I just wanted to follow up with the progress. Currently, sadly, it has not moved forward. I'm still trying to revamp the DateTime & Instant models so that they can be filtered/queried more naturally in Realm using standard Swift Date objects. I'm about half done on that. I'm hoping to finish that up within the next week, after which investigating STU3 is my primary goal. I will keep you posted here.

My apologies for the delay.

Cheers!

[marceden]

Hi Ryan,

I can only guess what it’s like to maintain a rather niche-opensource project on a quickly evolving technology… But I have to ask: Do you have any plans updating FireKit to a more recent FHIR release or is this totally out of your scope?
Running the generator fails at the moment, even with STU3, and I'm figuring out whether this is a FireKit oder fhir-parser-issue…

However, would be great to hear from you, even if you've deciced to not longer maintain this project.

Cheers and kind regards,

Marc

[ryanbaldwin]

Hi Marc!

Well, sadly, I don't have much in the way of plans for updating to STU3. After 7 years I recently left Healthcare, and my ability to dogfood FireKit on a newer version is, alas, no longer existent. Most of my spare professional development time is getting caught up on context/know-how in a new domain with a new company.

Regarding the fhir-parser issue - Each release of FireKit is locked to a specific commit of fhir-parser in order to try and avoid parsing issues. It should, as far as I know, still work if you clone v2.402.07 (horrible naming, I apologize for that). Further more, the "newest" version of FireKit (which is what, 1.5 years old now? oye) doesn't play well with Realm 3+ (Realm 2.10 is the stable partner).

In hindsight - while I love the functionality FireKit allowed - I think it's doing too much, in that it munges and conflates the layers. If I were to do this again, I would make it a proper bridging project which would be built on top of Smart-On-Fhir's offerings, and would provide a natural feeling API translating SOF's tech with an underlying Realm.

My apologies for being a bad news bear, Marc. I should update the readme to reflect reality.

[marceden]

Nah, don’t feel bad about that. No worries, that’s how things are going and I totally got this. And thanks for your honest opinion on the state of FireKit with some distance now. I'll take that into account and I will think about how I'm gonna go on. Thanks again for your efforts and all of my best wishes for your future career. Kind regards from Germany, Marc