Stream: questionnaire
Topic: realistically why separate group and display
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 16:13):
item.group v item.display:
Groups must nest and can have codes etc and a bunch of invariants on display ... but can treat a group just like a display functionally. (by adding instructions, background information ,etc the text to the group ). I think we ought to mention that here.
I personally think we ought to conflate group and display and treat all displays as groups
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 25 2018 at 19:23):
Group is an organizer that gets reflected in the response. display is just textual instructions. We should probably tighten the constraint to say that group must contain non-display items. Can you submit a change request?
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 20:30):
My point is that Group can contain textual information too. why have:
- group
* display
* question
when you can get away with:
- group ( include display text )
* question
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 20:31):
And this is an undocumented feature...
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 20:39):
if all you got is a bit of text then just:
- group
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 25 2018 at 21:03):
The group.text is the name of the group (and would be rendered as such). Display text would be rendered as instructions or help text and would look different
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 21:37):
Questionnaire.item.text Element Id Questionnaire.item.text Definition The name of a section, the text of a question or text content for a display item.
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 21:37):
That sounds like a design choice to me.
Eric Haas (Jun 25 2018 at 21:38):
I could put all three in group.text too
Paul Lynch (Jun 25 2018 at 22:51):
See https://gforge.hl7.org/gf/project/fhir/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=17208&start=0. A display item can now be help text for an item, and might not be shown until the user clicks on a help button next to the item.
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 00:03):
It is still an undocumented feature of group. All displays can be a group and
the display extension you reference does not prohibit it either.
Grahame Grieve (Jun 26 2018 at 03:25):
having read this thread, I'm not clear on why group is different to display
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 26 2018 at 05:03):
Group is intended to group a bunch of questions or other groups. The text for the group is the name of that group. That's not a design choice - that's what it means and that's how it's rendered. Agree we should change "The name of a section" to "The name of a group". It's going to get rendered as a heading. There's definitely a need to distinguish a heading label from text provided as instructions or help.
Brian Postlethwaite (Jun 26 2018 at 05:11):
I would not support an invariant that said that a group cannot contain all display items, we have a few questionnaires with sections like that.
In our cases its the first section that is all informational text to explain how to fill out the rest of the form.
(in our rendering we put them on tabs, and this is the first page)
Brian Postlethwaite (Jun 26 2018 at 05:12):
I guess if you add children to the display, then it would act as a group. But that wasn't the intent.
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 26 2018 at 06:12):
I thought we had a constraint prohibiting children on display items, but I guess we removed that. You'd still render differently if it was a display vs. a group
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 14:16):
Reluctantly, I agree with Loyd ;-). The rendering is the key argument. I will draft a more complete summary of the group v display v question and propose it be moved from Notes to the Introduction.
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 14:17):
..... although there are simple cases where group = display
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 26 2018 at 18:16):
I can't think of a usecase where you'd ever want to use group for display. If you want a display, use display. If you want to organize content under a group (possibly with a heading), use group.
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 19:27):
you have 6 questions no grouping - use the group with the text to say "answer these 6 questions by checking the appropriate box"
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 19:30):
I want to do adaptive forms, each Q is a single question - use Group with code and text equal display.
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 19:31):
although that last one may be a stretch.... lemme think about that
Lloyd McKenzie (Jun 26 2018 at 19:36):
That would be an ugly thing to have in root level title font. It would make much more sense to have no group and just a display item
Eric Haas (Jun 26 2018 at 19:49):
(deleted)
Astrid Corinna Wolff (Jun 28 2018 at 10:19):
We once had a questionnaire where we included several groups with the actual question text displayed as a group heading + a single child item of type=choice in each group that represented the question and that did not have its own text element. We did this because the questionnaire only had 7 questions, each question should have been emphasized and each question had about 10 choices (each with a longer display text) and it was important that all the choices/text was visible to the user at once (which means that we did not want to render it as a drop-down element).
However, I could not imagine why to use a group (without a child item) only for providing display text.
A group (with or without heading) + several display elements as children but without input elements does make sense to me and might be useful in some cases.
Eric Haas (Jul 03 2018 at 16:48):
I stubbed in GF#17439 to update the difference
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
