deschel wrote on Wednesday, January 30, 2013:
We are nearly finished with our Data Importer for OpenEMR and will be posting it in the next 1-2 weeks. Just need to iron out a couple of bugs and do a couple of tweaks. This is a feature that people have requested for quite some time.
In the Topic, “OpenEMR and Zend”, Rod wrote:
David, if you want to do the importer with Zend I think it could at least go into the “contrib” directory. Just make sure it’s separately installable, and I suggest making sure it works with ZF as distributed with Ubuntu to simplify installation in that case.
If the importer becomes truly compelling, we may decide to endorse Zend or someone might convert it to some other model. There are always options, and we like to encourage contributions.
I do not understand why Rod suggested placing it in the contrib directory and why he said that it should be separately installable. I do not necessarily feel that this is appropriate. Also, because there are different versions of Zend, using a separately/pre-installed version will make debugging a nightmare, and it may not work on a lot of systems. Additionally, what if someone is using a different OS from Ubuntu. I’m not using Ubuntu currently to serve OpenEMR.
Additionally, the Data Importer should not be an ancillary feature. I think that it is importand to have it as a core feature-one that is part of the normal installation, just as PHPMyAdmin is.
The plan is to add a leftnav menu item at “Administration->Other” just under “Database” and label it as “Data Import”.
We used the Zend framework and will be adding Zend to the library folder, to go alongside the numerous libraries that are there. I have had several people contact me relating to the Zend post that were extremely supportive of using it. One core OpenEMR developer stated that they are already using Zend for many of the features that they have programmed and are using it in their hosted solution.
I know that Zend is overkill for this particular project. However, it is being used more as a proof of concept. We are planning to utilize Zend in most of my future projects. So, the installation of Zend as part of this project serves as a foundation for our future ones.
So, can I get a suggestion of a more appropriate directory to place the data importer into?
David Eschelbacher