Automating FHIR IG Builds From Structured Data

This is likely to be a two or three part series.  Over the last year I've worked on four different FHIR Implementation Guides:  SANER, Mobile Health Application Data Exchange Assessment Framework, and V2 to FHIR. and the IHE ACDC Profile.  Each of these suffers from the "Lottery Problem" in that if I win the lottery and decide to retire, I'm going to have to train others how to run the tool chain that builds that content that the IG Publisher uses to generate the IG.

I hate having the lottery problem, because it puts me into the position of being the one who has to both maintain the toolchain, and run the builds when something important changes.  I can't get away with not maintaining the toolchain, but what I can do is make it a lot simpler so that it's obvious for anyone how to run it, and I've been working through that process as I advance the tools I'm using.  These days, my most recent project (SANER) only relies on Saxon's XSLT transformer and PLANTUML, which is better than a lot of custom JAVA code.

But that still leaves me in the Build Miester role, and I'd love to get out of that.  So I spent some time over the holidays and thereafter working towards getting GitHub Actions take over the work.  I'll work backwards from most recent to least recent to simplify (easy to hard), starting with SANER.

Saner runs four processes to complete a build: Two XSLT 2.0 based transforms of SANER.xml, and a PLANTUML transform of outputs produced by that to generate UML images from the images-source folder of the build, and finally ig-publisher.  I DON'T need to automate IG Publisher, because build.fhir.org handles that for me using the latest publisher and Github webhooks via the AutoBuilder.

But: I DO want to automate the transformations, and I'd also love to have an easy way to run the publisher locally from Eclipse or the command line.

The trick here is to use Github Actions.  There are three actions I need at least:

1. Checkout the Files that have been pushed on a feature branch.
2. Run a mvn build to perform the translations
3. Checkin the updated files.

The Maven build will handle the translations using two plugins:

1. The Maven XML Plugin
2. The PlantUML Plugin

Finally, I'll also enable the FHIR IG Publisher to be run using Maven through the Exec Maven Plugin during the "site" phase of the build.