FHIR Chat · Responses to nested questions

Stream: questionnaire

Topic: Responses to nested questions

Morten Ernebjerg (Mar 24 2020 at 16:16):

I'm just starting to play around with Questionnaire/QuestionnaireResponse (for STU3) and have a question regarding responses to questionnaires with nested questions.

I constructed the following Questionnaire with two questions, one nested within the other:

{
    "resourceType": "Questionnaire",
    "url": "http://example.com/Questionnaire/practice-questionnaire-test2",
    "status": "draft",
    "item": [{
        "linkId": "date",
        "required": true,
        "text": "Date of hospital visit",
        "type": "date",
        "item": [{
            "linkId": "rating",
            "required": true,
            "text": "What general score would you give the hospital on a scale from 1 to 10?",
            "type": "integer"
        }]
    }]
}

I expected the following to be a valid response:

{
    "resourceType": "QuestionnaireResponse",
    "questionnaire": {
        "reference": "http://example.com/Questionnaire/practice-questionnaire-test2"
    },
    "status": "completed",
    "item": [{
        "linkId": "date",
        "answer": [{
            "valueDate": "2020-03-23",
            "item": [{
                "linkId": "rating",
                "answer": [{
                    "valueInteger": 10
                }]
            }]
        }]
    }]
}

But this gives an error upon validation (latest JAR) - the validator does not find the second answer:

java -jar org.hl7.fhir.validator.jar -version 3.0.2 -questionnaire required -ig practice-questionnaire-test2.json  practice-questionnaireresponse-test2.json
(...)
*FAILURE* validating practice-questionnaireresponse-test2.json:  error:1 warn:0 info:0
  Error @ QuestionnaireResponse.item[0] (line 7, col15) : No response found for required item with id = 'rating'

I tried various other ways of structuring the response but did not find one that worked. Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?

Lloyd McKenzie (Mar 24 2020 at 16:37):

It may be you're not doing anything wrong. @Grahame Grieve - I can't see anything wrong with these instances, do you??

Grahame Grieve (Mar 30 2020 at 01:00):

the problem here is the whole answer/question thing. The validator is validating the item.answer.item, but it's actually looking for item.item when it gives that error message

Grahame Grieve (Mar 30 2020 at 01:01):

@Lloyd McKenzie the source questionnaire doesn't say anything item.item vs item.answer.item does it? they're both the same (this is in R3)

Lloyd McKenzie (Mar 30 2020 at 01:24):

item.item is used for children of groups, item.answer.item is used for children of questions. We've approved a change request to make that more clear.