Stream: implementers
Topic: Suggest change for diagnostic message in OperationOutcome
Joyce Quach (Oct 28 2021 at 15:05):
Hello, I was uploading a patient bundle to a public SMART server, https://r4.smarthealthit.org, and encountered a "400 Bad Request" HTTP response on an entry in the bundle. I learned that this was because the entry had an id > 64 characters with some further troubleshooting. However, I believe the diagnostic message in the OperationOutcome I got from checking the response doesn't immediately indicate that:
"Can not process entity with ID[mCODETrialMatchingCancerRelatedRadiationProcedure02PatientExample02], this is not a valid FHIR ID"
I'd like to suggest that perhaps the diagnostic message could be changed to be more descriptive as to why a FHIR ID is not valid, or that an additional diagnostic message can be added to indicate that (since OperationOutcome.issue.diagnostics is an array), similar to this diagnostic message:
"Can not create resource with ID[123], no resource with this ID exists and clients may only assign IDs which contain at least one non-numeric character".
I apologize in advance if there is some terminology I could better use to describe the issue- I am still new to FHIR.
edit: I've received some insight about this potentially being an issue with how the server handles invalid IDs, so this topic may not apply to the FHIR spec.
Lloyd McKenzie (Oct 28 2021 at 15:29):
Good practice is to provide an OperationOutcome with a detailed description of why something failed. However, depending on the layer of software at which the issue is detected, that's not always possible. So FHIR can't make a stronger statement than we already have. You're free to nudge particular implementers to be clearer - and sometimes they'll both be able to and care to change :)
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
