<0x1c> in Message Body

[Chris Beaudin]

Hi All,

We have a system sending transcription (MDM) messages to our Cloverleaf engine. Every once in a while, a message hangs in the sending system – it appears that it’s waiting for an ACK from the engine. After a bit of digging we’ve determined that the offending message has a <0x1c> character in the message body. Since the interface uses tcp_mlp for communication and <0x1c> is a meaningful character to the PDL (the first of the two stop characters), the engine is interpreting the message as garbage and not sending an ACK.

The vendor is suggesting we modify the PDL to accomodate them – but I’m not so sure… Is the sending system HL7 compliant if it sends mlp characters in the body of the message?

Thanks,

Chris

Topic

[James Cobane]

Chris,

While you can code around it in the pdl, I would agree that the vendor should “fix it”; it my mind they are violating the “standard” by incorporating a message delimiter in the body of the message.  I would push on the vendor – just my $.02 worth.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Chad Flodman]

I agree with James, get the vendor to fix it.

However, I have run across a vendor that would not resolve a similar issue with x0d (segment terminator) in the message data.  I do have a tcl that will review the message and remove a bad enconding character from a specific field.

It isn’t pretty, but it works.  Let me know if you can’t get the vendor to resolve and I can post it for you.

[Author]

Replies