I admit, LBF can be difficult to get use to. However, many users depend on this core templating engine as their only recourse for creating encounter forms for specific uses to their discipline. Most difficult for many is the row and column layouts but, once you get by that, LBF is pretty straight forward for most forms that are mainly questionnaires which often times, end up being transcribed elsewhere.
There are other reasons for LBF in patient documents such as using existing core forms such as History:
Note the help which can be added to templates but ignored in disposition.
This form is already in core and sorely needed in portal or intake.
For pure templates it is helpful to remember that they were meant for simple, mostly legal documents and it got carried away. However, they can be versatile enough to handle many document types if you always keep in mind, templates are simply tagged directive replacement where template resides inside a form tag wrapped by a div.
<div><form>$template</form></div>
So adding an icon can be as easy as:
<span><i class="fa fa-envelope fa-2x"></i>{varTextInput:320px}</span>
or a label
<label class="fa fa-envelope">Please Enter Blah</label>{varTextInput:120px}
Another important point is text vs html. By default all templates will be cleaned up on render by replacing all “\r\n” with a <br /> tag unless the {ParseAsHTML} directive is used, where in that case, linefeeds are simply removed without any replacements allowing to format as html rendering only. Remembering one also has the <pre></pre> tags for pure text.
Concerning template repository: I’m still working out the best way to handle these in dashboard. I always try to make the UX as clean and easy as possible. Sometimes i’m lacking but, be assured it is forefront in my mind. So, i’ll come up with something!!!
A note on this project. I never accept a vendors sponsorship unless it is allowed to be put in OpenEMR core for the community use. Many times this is just token funding where I end up taking on the responsibility for the feature implementation/integration and support. This includes making sure we provide for the existing release and v6.0. I’m not crying poor me but wish to point out why I put up these forum posts. It’s to gauge if the community finds the feature useful and whether I should go through all the effort or not. In this case i’m hesitant. Six likes from three people doesn’t exactly scream let’s do this.
So, I may not go through the effort to support and patch v5.0.2 and just wait to maybe put in v6.0. It’s getting very tedious trying to support v5.0.2 while developing for upcoming v6.0 release. I may publish an unofficial patch for those that want the feature and willing to take responsibility for their own implementation.
I have no idea what you mean here!
Looking forward to checking out the PR.
