patstl wrote on Monday, January 30, 2006:
Can anyone help me create customer encounter forms for a podiatrist office. Or forms in general
– Patrick
markleeds wrote on Monday, January 30, 2006:
Regarding the formscript.pl form creating tool:
I did test forms created at the time the script was written and they functioned properly. I was suprised to find that a form created now does not work in the current cvs version of OpenEMR. I can only guess that some change has broken compatability with older forms. I wrote the script based on an older form from version 2.6 I think. Now, the form comes up for data entry, but after submitting, it does not display at all and it does not insert into the database. If anyone is wondering how I let such poor quality work get by, at the time I wrote it, it did work with the current version of OpenEMR.
Since I very much need the script for my own use now, I will try to fix it. Sorry.
Suggestions regarding the current standards of form design are welcome. Otherwise, recommendations to a good existing form to use as a model would be helpful.
Thanks!
Mark
ajperezcrespo wrote on Monday, January 30, 2006:
A new version of the forms script (1.1 I believe) is located under r/contrib/forms/formmaker. Its about 9 months old.
drbowen wrote on Monday, January 30, 2006:
Mark,
Is it possibly to rewrite this in PHP?
If so it would make a great addition to the project. Lots of people want to be able to add their own custom forms. Including this under form administration would help a lot.
For me the generated files will add data to the database but I can’t view them. (currently using 2.7.2)
Sam Bowen, MD
markleeds wrote on Monday, January 30, 2006:
I don’t expect finding the problem and fixing it will be a big deal.
As far as porting it to PHP, it would probably only make sense to do that if I was planning to implement a web interface and incorporate it into OpenEMR. That would be ideal, but I don’t currently have plans to do this.
As it is, it is a simple command line tool which should work easily with any recent version of Perl without installing any additional modules. Almost any system running OpenEMR likely came with Perl pre-installed. If not, it is very easy to install. Much easier than installing PHP.
It’s really intended to be a tool for the knowledgable form designer to save some time and effort.
I’ll let you know when it’s ready. I’m going to have a more useful sample form included with it this time.
Mark
markleeds wrote on Tuesday, January 31, 2006:
Very strange. I downloaded via CVS the current files and setup a test install of OpenEMR. According to the login screen, it’s version 2.8.1. I copied formscript.pl into the forms directory and started making a variety of forms with it. I tested them in entering data, viewing it later from the encounter screen, and generating reports. Everything worked without any problems.
I can’t wait to get to the office tomorrow and see what the difference is.
speaking of differences, if you run
diff new.php view.php
in fee_sheet, you get no output because the files are identical (as advertised). On the other hand, run the same in a formscript.pl generated form and you get:
0a1
> <!-- view.php -->
10,11c11
< <form method=post action="<?echo $rootdir;?>/forms/a1_preop_physical/save.php?mode=new" name="a1_preop_physical">
< <hr>
—
> <form method=post action="<?echo $rootdir?>/forms/a1_preop_physical/save.php?mode=update&id=<?echo $_GET["id"];?>" name="my_form">
41a42
>
Well, at least a few simple things to check tomorrow…
markleeds wrote on Tuesday, January 31, 2006:
Disregard the above, I believe I have found the problem. I did not consider escaping quotes. If the layout file with the form data contains ’ or " it will mess everything up for obvious reasons.
I wonder if this is the problem others have had in trying it out.
I have typed the information from the review of systems check form and generated a new form from it and it is pretty good with the feature of reporting unchecked boxes as negatives (this is an optional feature). Probably a useful feature for justifying higher level coding.
Very soon I will submit an improved version with cleaned up punctuation, properly escaped quotes, and better documentation.