Hi Carl,
I guess the real issue here is what is a facility? DHIS2 has no intrinsic notion of what a facility actually is. In fact, there is no need to have facilities at all. We could organize the hierarchy based on water points, or villages, or implementing partners or even golf courses in some extreme implementations. As you have noted in your mail, you may have facilities spread out all over the hierarchy at different levels. So, the only way I can think to do this would be to use an organisation unit group to distinguish facilities from those orgunits which are not facilities which would have some meaning to the external system.
Bob Jolliffe (on vacation at the moment) and I were discussing a similar situation about syncing the orgunits. I am not sure what he finally decided to do, but my feeling was that pulling a complete list of orgunits (api/organisationUnits.xml) and then processing the “lastUpdated” and “created” attributes would be the best way, as opposed to some sort of partial sync. All those units which have been added since the last sync would need to be added, while all those updated since the last sync would need to be updated. I guess this is going to depend a lot on the system you are syncing with, but that API end point should provide this information.
The api/organisationUnits.xml will give you a listing or all orgunits. Use the ?paging=false parameter to turn off the paging, and get the full list, alternatively, using the ?page= paramater to go through each page identified in the property. Once you have this list, and determined which orgunits you need by 1. Filter facilities based on membership in an orgunit group called “Facilities”, 2) Filter this list to get the orgunits you need to sync , you then access the API end point of the particular orgunit (example) to get all the information about this orgunit. This URL is available from the “href” attribute in the api/organisationUnits.xml endpoint.
The problem at the moment with the FRED API spec is that it only deals with facilities. But there is usually much more in a DHIS2 hierarchy…districts, provinces, community health workers, etc. At the moment, this is the scope of FRED, but there is usually more to what is stored in the hierarchy in a DHIS2 instance, so what you get in the FRED API is a lot more than just facilities. I think if implementers needed the FRED API, then an orgunit group could be used to filter what gets exposed in the FRED API and what doesn’t. I do not see the need for a system level flag to do this, but having the ability to filter what is in FRED and what isn’t might be a good thing.
Best regards,
Jason
···
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 2:44 PM, Carl Leitner cleitner@capacityplus.org wrote:
Hi All,
Thanks for your feedback. The one case of immediate interest is for Bihar, India. As I understand, there are something like 13-14,000 facilities spread across levels 4, 5 and 6 and looking at the metadata export.xml I couldn’t see anything to distinguish facilities from blocks, districts, etc.
One thing we want to support in particular, is to be able to poll DHIS2 for new facilities and automatically add them to iHRIS. I know from the Meta-Data export.xml, I can look at the timestamps of the organizationalUnit and if I combine this with a
Lacking a good way to flag facilities, I am not sure how exactly the view would work. I am also guessing that it would require more developer involvement at each implementation.
It sounds like the organizationalUnitGroup may be the best option, at least for the short-term. The only drawback I would see is that if you all do decide to distinguish facilities in FRED, we may need or want to re-do the work to align with what you have done for FRED. So if I know what direction you are heading with that, I can try and stay in alignment.
Just to give you an idea of where we are on the iHRIS side of things, we already have the ability to load in organizational units and data elements from the Meta-Data export.xml. We are using this to link existing facilities in iHRIS to the corresponding organizational unit in DHIS in order that we can report out data to DHIS in .dxf.
http://www.ihris.org/wiki/Linking_iHRIS_Facilities_and_DHIS_Organizational_Units
We are planning on adding the same linking for the administrative/geographic hierarchy soon as it is pretty trivial to do.
It would also be pretty trivial to swap from using the full meta-data export to the .xml exposed in
http://apps.dhis2.org/demo/api/organisationUnits.xml
if it weren’t paged. There does seem to be a difference here though in what is exposed… you seem to have only the UID and not the ID.
Cheers,
-carl
On Aug 16, 2013, at 5:15 AM, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
wrote:
Just wanted to add a clarification and another approach.
I stated incorrectly that the FRED API only returns the lowest level. In fact, it returns all orgunits, irrespective of their placement in the hierarchy. This obviously makes it challenging to distinguish facilities from districts. After chatting with Morten about this, something like “paramater.level=4” may be added soon, to be able to distinguish between different orgunit levels, but this would only work in you case, if all facilities are at the same level, which is often not the case.
The last approach, which may be simpler from an integration point of view perhaps, is the creation of an SQL view, which you can then call from the WebAPI documented here and here.
Regards,
Jason
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On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Lars Helge Øverland
larshelge@gmail.com wrote:
To add to what Jason is saying… Like suggested above there are at least two approaches:
- Use the org unit level. One caveat is that all org units at a level may not necessarily be facilities. To fetch all org units at the level you can GET at
http://apps.dhis2.org/dev/api/organisationUnits.xml?level=2 (use .json if necessary)
- Use a group. This is more flexible but requires that all facilities obviously are put in that group. To get all units in a group you can GET at:
http://apps.dhis2.org/dev/api/organisationUnitGroups/w1Atoz18PCL.xml
where w1… is the uid of the group and use whatever approach is most feasible for each DHIS deployment. Some ideas for your use-case:
- Make fetching of DHIS facilities configurable as an URL on the iHRIS side.
- DHIS could expose a special “/facilities” resource and we could do the mapping on the DHIS side. But then we are maybe starting to step FRED on its toes.
cheers
Lars
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Jason Pickering
jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Carl,
This is of course going to depend on each implementation and what a “facility” actually means.
As an example provides us this…
http://apps.dhis2.org/demo/api/organisationUnitLevels.xml
<organisationUnitLevel name=“PHU” created=“2011-12-24T11:24:22.935+0000” lastUpdated=“2011-12-24T11:24:22.935+0000” level="4"href="http://apps.dhis2.org/demo/api/organisationUnitLevels/m9lBJogzE95 " id=“m9lBJogzE95”/>
which defines the organisation unit levels, and we see “PHU” which I guess is the equivalent to the facility level.
As an example.
http://apps.dhis2.org/demo/api/organisationUnits/ueuQlqb8ccl.xml shows this has the attribute level=“4”.
So, it is just a matter filtering out the orgunits which have a particular level means “facility” to you
The FRED API of course is the other alternative, but this will only work currently, if your lowest organisation unit is the facility level. In our case, the facility level is 4, but our lowest organisation unit is level 6, so FRED does not work for us. I do think it would be good however to indicate which level is the facility level, and this would be the level which is used by FRED. Of course, if you have facilities at different levels, (health posts for instance, which may be children of health centers), which could be problematic.But, an orgunit group “Facility” which would be part of an “Organisationunit group set” such as “Type” would also do the job, again filtering out the orgunits which are part of the “Facility” organisation unit group.
Regards,
Jason
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Knut Staring knutst@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Carl,
Just forwarding your question to this list, where it is likely to be seen by more people:
https://answers.launchpad.net/dhis2/+question/234034
We have run across the task of needed to get a list of the facilities in DHIS2 to export to other systems. My particular use case is with iHRIS, though I have need to do this for setting up provider registries which need to reference facility data that DHIS2 is the authoritative source for.
Among several DHIS installations, It does not seem that there is a consistent way to easily determine which of the organizational units are facilities. I have been looking in particular at the metadata Export.xml to try to extract this data and although there are some heuristics that will get us 90% of what we want, I would like to have something we can consistently rely on.
A few options come to mind:
- request that DHIS2 implementations create an organisationUnitGroup called “Facility” and add each of the facilities to this group? Presumably we would request that they would also create additional organisationUnitGroups for each of the levels of the organizationGroup hierarchy (e.g. Block, District, State) and put all of this under a organisationUnitGroupSet called something like “Administrative Hierarchy.” This would require no additional programming to the existing DHIS2 codebase as I understand.
- Ask the DHIS2 developers to add a boolean flag, “Facility,” to the main organisationalUnit record. Presumably this would be relatively quick to do.
- Wait until this issue in FRED:
https://github.com/facilityregistry/fred-api/issues/62
gets resolved and implemented in DHIS? This seems like it would require a fair amount of developer time and specification that is not yet done.
I don’t care to much which of the above options gets implemented (or even if there is another alternative that works better), but I would like to have a “best practice” to point to when trying to extract facility information from DHIS as XML.
Thanks so much!
Cheers.
-carl
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