as far as I see CategoryOptions right now, codes and short names of CategoryOptions must be defined globally unique. If I want to code gender-male as “M”, I cannot code another “M” for approach-multilateral. In the same way, numbered codes are also not possible for multiple categories, unless I include a code for the Category into the Option-code.
I would have expected uniqueness within one category, which would allow for short codes or names to be displayed in result tables and charts and would have allowed me to import the original codes from our source-system without additional mappings.
Is there any way for me to define CategoryOptions codes and short names unique per Category, e.g. is there some hidden setting to allow that?
Uwe you are correct in your discovery regarding uniqueness.
There is a bit of history to the problem which I can't go into all the
details here. But I do agree that global uniqueness of catopt codes
(and names) shouldn't be required across categories, but currently
unfortunately you will have to work around it till we work up a better
solution.
···
On 30 November 2015 at 11:04, Uwe Wahser <uwe@wahser.de> wrote:
Dear all,
as far as I see CategoryOptions right now, codes and short names of
CategoryOptions must be defined globally unique. If I want to code
gender-male as “M”, I cannot code another “M” for approach-multilateral. In
the same way, numbered codes are also not possible for multiple categories,
unless I include a code for the Category into the Option-code.
I would have expected uniqueness within one category, which would allow for
short codes or names to be displayed in result tables and charts and would
have allowed me to import the original codes from our source-system without
additional mappings.
Is there any way for me to define CategoryOptions codes and short names
unique per Category, e.g. is there some hidden setting to allow that?
the reason for having “global” uniqueness on category options is to simplify synchronization between systems and for uniformity between DHIS objects (codes are unique across all “identifiable objects”). I agree that it could be convenient to have uniqueness-within-category. That also provides some complexity when synchronizing meta-data between DHIS systems.
In any case, the idea is that you should re-use category options between categories. The benefit here is improved analytics - you can now analyse data for a category option across categories in pivot tables etc. So as an example, if you have a single “Female” category option in the system, you can now do analysis across all data elements (with different category combinations) that uses this option.
I feared this would be the answer, although I had hopes, since there is no unique key on those attributes in the db-table.
It would help, if I was able to identify in the api response for CategoryOptionCombos, which CategoryOption came from which Category in that combination. Is there any way to get this information? If I use the cascade categoryOptionCombo[categoryOption[Category]] in the api-fields, I get every dimensions, where an Option is used, which doesn’t help, of course.
Uwe you are correct in your discovery regarding uniqueness.
There is a bit of history to the problem which I can’t go into all the
details here. But I do agree that global uniqueness of catopt codes
(and names) shouldn’t be required across categories, but currently
unfortunately you will have to work around it till we work up a better
solution.
On 30 November 2015 at 11:04, Uwe Wahser uwe@wahser.de wrote:
Dear all,
as far as I see CategoryOptions right now, codes and short names of
CategoryOptions must be defined globally unique. If I want to code
gender-male as “M”, I cannot code another “M” for approach-multilateral. In
the same way, numbered codes are also not possible for multiple categories,
unless I include a code for the Category into the Option-code.
I would have expected uniqueness within one category, which would allow for
short codes or names to be displayed in result tables and charts and would
have allowed me to import the original codes from our source-system without
additional mappings.
Is there any way for me to define CategoryOptions codes and short names
unique per Category, e.g. is there some hidden setting to allow that?