Reply To: Postscript, PDF and TXT

[Traci Zee]

I routinely do Lab Results data in PDF format by having the sending system ‘Base 64’ encode the PDF data.  The receiving system then decodes the data before storing it in the db.

The crux of the issue is that PDF and Postscript data can contain characters that will cause problems in Cloverleaf.  Unexpected interpretation can occur if, for example, characters in the mlp wrapper (0x0b at the beginning and 0x1c, 0x0d at the end) come in the middle of the HL7 message.   The ‘Base 64’ encoding makes all the characters in the printable ASCII set allowing the data to pass through the engine w/o unexpected side-effects.

Base 64 encoding is fairly easy to accomplish and is well documented on  the web.  

You may be able to do FTP of these types of files without encoding the data.   We’ll see what others have to say.

Traci Zee

Sr. Interface Analyst

WebMD

tzee@webmd.net

770.844.9242