Develop a small outpatient management system using XForms and Ruby on Rails, part 3rd

Realize nurse and Doctor Xform

This series of articles describes how to use XForms, ibm®db2®purexml™, and Ruby to simplify the development of WEB applications, divided into four parts, this is the third part. This series of articles will develop a fictional application to manage patient information in the doctor's office. You'll see the power of each technology, and you'll see how to combine it. Part 3rd will develop a nurse's form to edit patient data and learn how to use Ruby to implement such a feature.

Brief introduction

Part 1th of this series has designed a WEB application that allows patients to enter information in a doctor's office. discussed how to create such an application using XForms, DB2 PureXML, and Ruby on Rails, and experimented with the use of these applications. The 2nd part starts implementing this application. The first XForm is designed, and then the Ruby on Rails backend that inserts the form data into DB2 is created. We will continue to leverage XML across the entire application through these three technologies.

Part 3rd will further refine the Ruby user interface, add two new tables forms view and edit existing patients: A KIOSK view edit patient information, a new Triage view allows nurses to view, edit, and approve entered patient data. After the data entered is approved by the nurse, the patient can go to see a doctor. When the patient is seeing a doctor, the doctor can view the patient's data and add the data based on his own observations. Part 4 introduces the structure of the physician's form, which allows the physician to read and edit any patient data approved by the nurse and to increase the results of the doctor's diagnosis.

Prerequisite

This article assumes that readers have a certain understanding of XML and WEB applications. It is certainly helpful to dabble in the three core technologies, XFORMS,DB2 PureXML, and Ruby on Rails, but it's definitely not necessary. This article is written using the Mozilla XForms plug-in version 0.8.0.3. It provides XForms run-time support for all Mozilla browsers, such as Firefox. Another useful Mozilla plugin is the XForms Buddy, which provides an xforms debugger. This article is using the 0.5.6 version. IBM's DB2 database server is also required. This paper uses DB2 express-c 9.5 to support Windows®, linux®, and UNIX® systems. Ruby on Rails is also required. This article uses the Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 1.2.5. The Mongrel WEB server used in conjunction with Rails is also used. You can install via Ruby Gems (just enter the gem install mongrel on the command line).

Edit existing patient data

Although patients are able to enter data into the system, how do the returned patients update their information? You can only create new patients and view the results at this time. Now you need to develop a form to edit and update the original patient information.