Pathcopy not sending all fields

[Mike Strout]

I have been experiencing some strange issues with Pathcopy recently. As we are working on some Integrated Testing to our new LIS, we are finding that their specs are not wholly correct and we are getting some truncation of fields because the field length on the HL7 format variant is too small.

When I Pathcopy this field, it copies everything until the field is truncated. In this case, PV1-3

To fix this, I do the following…

1. Open the format and create a new field with the necessary length and in this case, a type of ST, because while the 2.3 source has a PL type, the target is 2.2, which doesn’t have a PL type.

2. Add the new field to the existing segment

3. Remove the previous field.

4. Save the variant

Now that I have a custom field in the outbound format, pathcopy no longer writes to that custom PV1-3 field. However, if I pathcopy to PV1-3, the entire field is populated. I have seen this in a few other custom fields too. The only way to get data into them is to explicitly copy or pathcopy to the custom field. Is this normal or am I not doing something right?

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Did you try a reformat?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Mike Strout]

Yes, I tried reformatting the Xlate.

[Jim Kosloskey]

OK I am guessing the segment structures inbound and outboounnd do not match up (because you have changed the outbound so it no longer matches the inbound) and you are trying to do a segment level PATHCOPY.

I am also guessing (because I don’t use PATHCOPY beyond the field level that much) that PATHCOPY at the segment level is sensitive to the two segments matching up.

Have you tried to just change the length of the existing PV1-3 field and not use a User Field?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Alice Kazin]

Sometimes you have to stay away from Pathcopy, particularly when there are a lot of fields that you don’t want to send.

[Mike Strout]

I just got a tip from a fellow Cloverleaf developer that I thought I would pass along, even though it didn’t solve my issue.

When copying from one variant to another, make sure the field IDs for the custom fields you create match on both sides of the translate. For example, when pathcopying PID from 2.3 to 2.2, fields 28-30 typically don’t exist in the target variant. When creating them, don’t use the automatically assigned 9000x fields, use 00739 to 00741.

I was pretty hopefully about this tip, but in my case it still didn’t seem to matter. I finally just had to pathcopy at the field level. 🙁 Oh well

[Robert Milfajt]

I remember way back last Millennium, where PATHCOPYing a PID from 2.1 variant to 2.2 variant didn’t work.  Aaaah, the good old days…  🙂

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

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