Opening/Loading HL7 Files

Owned by Jonathan Reis
Nov 20, 2023
3 min read

Opening a File

For your convenience, there are several ways to open a file in HL7Spy:

  1. Use the File/Open menu option, Ctrl-O, or click on the “Open File” button  in the Message Editor window. These options display the standard Windows File Open dialog. To open multiple files, hold down the Control key and select files, or hold down the Shift key, click on a file in the list, and click on another file while still holding the Shift key to select a range of files.


  2. Drag and drop files from Windows Explorer to the HL7Spy title bar.
  3. Use the “Open Folder” menu option or click on the "Open Folder" button. This option displays a dialog that allows you to specify which files in a particular directory are opened. It is recommended to use “Open Folder” over options (1) or (2) if the number of files is over 100. The Windows File Open dialog has some limitations on the number of files that can be opened, whereas Open Folder can open thousands of files.

         

The options in this dialog are described here:

  1. Directory - Specify the path of the folder where the HL7 message files are located, or click on the folder icon to select a path.
  2. File Search - Specify the extension of the files to be opened. More than one extension can be specified by separating extensions with a semicolon.
  3. Content Search - Allows you to specify a regular expression or text that will be run on the text of each file. Please refer to the following wiki article for further information, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Character_classes.
    1. Use - Only works with a regular expression, if Content Search finds a match the file will be included, otherwise, it will be ignored.
    2. Match Case - Only works with text, if Content Search finds a case-sensitive match the file will be included, otherwise, it will be ignored.
  4. Merge Files into a single file before loading - If you know the files are text, i.e. not gzip, bzip2, or zip format, then using this option will dramatically decrease the time it takes HL7Spy to open thousands of files.
  5. Recurse Subdirectories - If selected, files in subdirectories of the selected directory will be included; otherwise, only files in the directory will be included. 

By default, tabs are displayed in the order of the first message in the tab. This behavior can be disabled from the “Options/Order Tabs by MSH-7”.

Opening More than 1 File

When opening multiple files at a time, HL7Spy displays a dialog that allows you to control whether you want the files to be loaded into a single message tab, or whether a tab should be created for each file. If you choose to load the messages into a single tab, the options for controlling how the messages should be sorted are enabled.

Note: HL7Spy automatically disables the “Tab Per File” option if more than 20 files are loaded at a time.

File Types Supported

HL7Spy will detect and open the following files types:

  • Standard 0x0bMSH...0x1c0x1d
  • Single message in the file with no framing bytes
  • Carriage return separated messages
  • Carriage return with Line Feed separated messages
  • Japanese framing (omits the 0x0b character at the beginning of the message)
  • EGate log file format
  • Pyxis log file format
  • STC Datagate formats (several flavors)
  • IDX ConnectR log format
  • Messages encoded in UTF16 format

Message streams that have been compressed in ZIP, GZIP, or BZIP2 will be automatically uncompressed before loading.

If HL7Spy does not correctly open your HL7 file format, please see the Advanced Topics section entitled “Message Framing” for details on how to configure HL7Spy to open more unconventional formats.