engine removing empty pieces at end of segments

[Tim Gobbel]

I am on 5.6R1, AIX 5.3.  I put an Xlate in yesterday and before it went in, all the null pieces at the ends of segments in ORM and ORU messages went thru to the OB side.  After I put the Xlate in, all the null pieces at the ends of the segments have been stripped off so that even the last “|” after any data filled piece is also missing.  Is there some setup or switch that causes this to happen?  How can I get all the pieces, even the null ones to pass thru?  Thanx!

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[Rentian Huang]

That’s interesting Tim, do you have some examples? Do you think it is something to do with 5.6? Did you have this problem prior to 5.6?

[Mike Grieger]

If I’m not mistaken, what you are describing is actually following the HL7 convention… that the field separators need only exist through the last valued field (and not needed to follow that last valued field).

However, I think one way to do what you are trying to do would be to edit your outbound variant, and make the last field that you do want to see the field separator in a ‘required’ field vs. optional.  Although, I don’t recall on which Cloverleaf versions this trick works with…

[Chris Williams]

And just to emphasize what Mike is saying, the Field Separators are just that, separators, not Field Terminators. A separator as the last character of a segment before the carriage-return would indicate there is an empty required field following it.

[Tim Gobbel]

Thanks for all the responses.  Jim K also called to note what the others have that the dropping of the empty pieces at the end of a segment is HL7 protocol.  Any translation will cause this to occur and I do not think it is 5.6 specific.  It appears that the vendor may have installed other changes without telling me.  The problem in the PICIS ED system persisted even after I backed out my changes.  Thanks agin for clarifying things!

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