FHIR Notepad++ Plug-in: Tools for #FHIR developers

Nov 24, 2015

I’m pleased to announce that the FHIR Plug-in for Notepad++ that was distributed and tested at the DevDays in Amsterdam last week is now ready for general release. Notepad++ is a powerful text editor that’s pretty popular with developers - it seems most of us who use windows use it. And it has a flexible and powerful plug-in framework with an active community around that. So it was the logical choice for a set of FHIR tools. The FHIR tools themselves offer useful functionality for FHIR developers (programmers, analysts), based on the kinds of things that we need to do at connectathons or for authoring content for the specification.

ToolBox

The FHIR Toolbox makes the following functionality available:

  • XML / JSON interconversion
  • Interactive and background resource validation
  • FHIR Path execution and debugging (more on that in a subsequent post)
  • Create a new populated resource from its definition (or a profile on it)
  • Connect to a server (including Smart-on-FHIR servers)
  • Create a new populated resource from its definition (or a profile on it)
  • Open a resource from a server
  • PUT/POST a resource to a server
  • Narrative generation

Visualizer

In addition, there’s a visualizer provided. This shows the following kind of information:

  • Narrative for the resource
  • Validation and Path execution results
  • Information about the current element (e.g. viewer for attachments, codes, references)

Note that the FHIR Plug-in doesn’t provide syntax highlighting for XML or JSON - there’s other plug-ins for them.

Additional Notes:

  • The FHIR tools are based on DSTU2
  • There is ongoing active development of the plug-in, so expect glitches and bugs (report bugs using myFHIRServer Github project)
  • To get notified of updates, subscribe to the RSS link from the downloads page. Or the plug-in itself will notify when a new version is released
  • yes, Notepad++ is only available for windows. For OSX developers, well, you can get a windows VM. It’s unlikely that it will be feasible to port the tools to OSX
  • For further documentation, see the Wiki page