PDF – there is no inherent parser for PDF in Cloverleaf – however typically PDF documents are either imbedded in an HL/7 message using a specific OBX Data Type with encoding (typically Base64) – or- by using a refernce pointer Data Type (OBX again typically) to point to the location of the PDF which the receiving system then reads at the location pointed to by the reference pointer.
For XML, if you have a schema or DTD you can use the Xlate to get data elements from the XML and create an HL/7 message containing those elements in the appropriate HL/7 message event/type structure.
I would recommend you be Cloverleaf 5.6 or later (later is even better) for XML.
email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.
There are also utilities for converting PDF to text, and you can scrape the text information for fields to put in your HL7. We use “pdftotext” which is part of the xpdf (link) package.
We also use pdftk (link) for splitting apart multi-page PDF’s by account.
Currently our utilities for PDF processing are called from shell scripts running outside of Cloverleaf. The scripts create HL7 messages in files which are put into directories that Cloverleaf scans using the fileset/local protocol.
Sure. A simple way to do this would be to write fields from the HL7 message to a text file, then use a2ps (from the a2ps package on Red Hat, also available from other sources) to convert to postscript and use Ghostscript with the “pdfwrite” driver to convert postscript to PDF. You could call these utilities from a TPS proc, then use “msgread” to read the output back into Cloverleaf and route to an outbound thread.
.
.