If you think you are going to implement a brand new feature during Connectathon week, then you probably are about as brain dead as our poster child for accidents waiting to happen on my right. Having said that, my job for this week is to at least get started on implementing a clinical quality language execution engine into my FHIR Server.
So much for brains, right? One of the biggest challenges I've had is that while there's plenty of open source implementations out there, there's not a whole lot of documentation on how to use them. And while as a language, CQL is certainly easy enough to read, there's some very basic assumptions about a programming language that are left completely unstated in the standard.
"What does hello world look like in CQL?" is one of those questions that I hadn't found (nor could Google) anyone addressing.
That's a really good question. The answer isn't to be found in the CQL Specification, but I did eventually figure it out. It looks like this:
define result: 'Hello world!'
Pretty simple. The execution of a CQL program basically produces a list of results, where each result has a name and a value. This makes it really ideal to use a JSON representation for output, by the way. There's also a type (associated with the value), and a location associated with the definition that you can get out of the engine I'm using (which makes it really handy for debugging).
This was my DUH moment last night. Now it doesn't have to be yours. I think I'm about to join that open source community as a doc writer (at least to start off).
Keith
So much for brains, right? One of the biggest challenges I've had is that while there's plenty of open source implementations out there, there's not a whole lot of documentation on how to use them. And while as a language, CQL is certainly easy enough to read, there's some very basic assumptions about a programming language that are left completely unstated in the standard.
"What does hello world look like in CQL?" is one of those questions that I hadn't found (nor could Google) anyone addressing.
That's a really good question. The answer isn't to be found in the CQL Specification, but I did eventually figure it out. It looks like this:
define result: 'Hello world!'
Pretty simple. The execution of a CQL program basically produces a list of results, where each result has a name and a value. This makes it really ideal to use a JSON representation for output, by the way. There's also a type (associated with the value), and a location associated with the definition that you can get out of the engine I'm using (which makes it really handy for debugging).
This was my DUH moment last night. Now it doesn't have to be yours. I think I'm about to join that open source community as a doc writer (at least to start off).
Keith
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