Connexion 14.5 R5 (14.5.2255)

Possible Breaking Change

Please note that there was some ambiguous behavior in the message attachments logic. In previous versions, if you made changes to attachments on a message context and called context.Attachments.Save(), then no changes would be persisted to the original message. If you did not call save, then any attachment changes were saved. We have updated the behavior in this build to be agnostic of whether or not Save() has been called. If you want to update the original message attachments, set the context.Attachments.UpdateOriginalMessage = true.

The default behavior is to not update the attachments on the source message. This is a very unusual use-case for this functionality and we are not expecting this to break anyone, but please verify your channels if you are using the attachments functionality.

Notes

This release contains minor fixes to both Connexion and Integrator as well as a few new features.

Connexion Features

• Low privilege install / configuration:  In order to support deployment at Mayo Clinic, we have added the ability to install and/or configure Connexion without SysAdmin permissions. In this scenario, an empty database is created by the DBA at the target organization. An account with DBO permissions is supplied only at install / configuration time which allows the creation of tables / stored procedures. Standard operation executes under the DBReader/Writer set. Full Details.

• Channel import filtering: A filter textbox has been added to the channel import dialog to make it easier to find a subset of channels within a channel file containing many channels.

• Explicit channel locking: We have changed the way channel locking operates to make it more deterministic and reliable. In previous versions, a channel was locked as soon as the configuration became dirty. In this version, the UI is read-only until you explicitly lock the channel. At this point, your UI becomes read-write, and other users cannot edit the channel until you release your lock. The UI has been updated to reflect the importance this change. In order to edit a channel, you must now use the following sequence:

1. 1. Click the lock icon (in either the channel bar or the device bar). The green background indicates no other use has the channel locked. You may also use the keystroke ctrl + enter to toggle between the lock states.
   2. Make an required edits.
   3. Release the lock (by clicking the lock icon or ctrl + enter).

When another user owns the lock, the channel will display an orange background. When another user has released the lock, but the channel has changed, the background will change to red to signify that your copy is out-of-date. We realize this feature adds an extra step in the typical operation of Connexion, however we feel it's important to harden this logic as more installations are used concurrently. There may be cases where you want certain parts of your custom device UI to remain usable even when a client is in read-only mode (for example, the query button on the queue). We have provided a framework to enable this behavior which we'll detail in a separate document.

• Multi-threaded queue: The SQL-Server-based queue can now operate in a multi-threaded fashion. There is useful when sending information to a remote system over a slow network (or when the remote system is slow to respond). In order to utilize this functionality, all devices downstream of the queue (up to the end of the channel or the next queue) must be thread-safe and marked with the CanProcessInParallel flag.

  Threadable Device

  [DevicePlugin("My Device", "A thread safe device", DeviceDefinitionFlags.CanProcessInParallel, typeof(object), typeof(object), typeof(MyDeviceConfigurationFactory))]
  public class MyDevice
  {
  }

  
  
  The 'Multi-threaded' radio button will be enabled if all downstream devices expose the CanProcessInParallel flag. When 'Multi-threaded' is selected, two additional fields are displayed:

• • Max Concurrency: The maximum number of concurrent operations allowed. Please note that the .NET will determine an optimum number of concurrent operations based on your current system load and system hardware, so the actual throughput may be lower than the number used.

  • Maintain Message Order: Ensures that messages for a patient are grouped together and run synchronously, ensuring the order of messages for a specific patient is maintained. For this to work, the messages you are operating on must expose an MRN keyword (HL7 does natively).

• Monitoring Framework: A framework for acting on system state and statistics. Within the system settings area, a new tab has been added "Monitoring". This feature exposes a custom code pane with an event which is called each time the system state or statistics change. This allows you to act upon these changes. For example, you may want to update an edge service or write an event to the OS when certain conditions are met. The information provided to you (via the StateChangedEventArgs) contains all the state and statistics for each group, tab, channel, and device. The default behavior is to only send what has changed since the last set of statistics were provided, however you can set the Reset property to true to receive the entire state object.
  

Integrator Features

• Move database: In the current version, the message database is installed in the Integrator sandbox (C:\programdata\Connexion.Integrator\Mongo). It's not unusual for the C drive to have very little space (as it's used as an OS drive), and we have had requests for the message database location to be user-configurable. In this version we have added a 'Move Database' feature which allows you to specify a new location for the database, post-install.
  
• Display .NET version and OS Version: Columns added to display the OS and .NET version.
• Remotely upgrade .NET: Add the ability to remotely deploy new versions of the .NET framework. Please note that even though the .NET framework advertises 100% backwards compatibility, we have experience a few cases where upgrading the .NET version breaks other applications.

General Improvements

Fixes