View source for Test Message Generator for the Eclipse Open Health Framework

== Test Message Generator for the Eclipse Open Health Framework ==
This project is an extension to the [http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/ Open Healthcare Framework] (OHF) Eclipse project, and was part of [http://code.google.com/soc/2007/ Google Summer of Code 2007]. Within OHF, different health care entities exchange messages filled with such things as patient information or lab results. Functionality already existed within OHF to create and edit such messages, but each message had to be created and populated by hand. This project allows for the automated mass generation of such messages, allowing easier testing of both the messages and the software that deals with them. Such testing is particularly essential in healthcare, where errors can cost lives.

A user creates a batch of test messages by starting with a sample message instance and replacing certain fields inside it with tokens which indicate that the field is supposed to be populated by outside data. The user then provides a data source, specifies some options for the naming, location and number of the output test messages and the generator code does the rest, generating the specified batch. The current implementation provides three types of data sources: XML files; databases that are accessible through JDBC; and strings that are generated to conform to a regular expression. In addition, the project supports extension by allowing the user to provide additional sources of data.


== Tutorials ==


The following tutorials detail using all aspects of the test message generator:

[[Creating a message batch, using an XML data source as example]]<br>
[[Details on the XML data source]]<br>
[[Details on the JDBC data source]]<br>
[[Details on regular expressions as a data source]]<br>
[[Extending the generator by providing additional sources of data]]