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National Record Locator for developers

The developer area shows you the code behind the Demonstrator (interactive guide) which will provide the details around the code construct of the demonstrator, code examples of how to connect to the NRL, and access to a reference implementation (stub) of the NRL API to allow quick and easy testing.   

Topology

The Demonstrator is made up of three components:

  • the front-end demonstration applications 
  • a back-end API that supports the "demonstration applications" and acts as an adapter to connect to the NRL
  • a reference implementation (Stub) of the NRL API that the adapter connects to

The demonstration applications are built using the Aurelia JavaScript framework.

The back-end API, its adapter and also the NRL ‘stub’ is built using .NET Core v2.


.NET FHIR Library

There is a handy .NET STU3 FHIR Library available that helps to streamline development of a FHIR server and manage FHIR resources.


Java HAPI FHIR Library

An earlier version of the Stub was deployed to allow for quick development against a server that could handle FHIR DocumentReference resources.

This was built off the HAPI FHIR solution.

The HAPI FHIR Library has an excellent out of the box solution that takes around 15 minutes to set up and deploy which is open source and free to use.

Data and code

Data

The demonstration applications and NRL stub uses fictitious data that is stored in a MongoDB database.  It's only a small set of data but can be added to easily. More information about what data can be used in the stub and how to rerun the data commands is available through the wiki.  

The data scripts can be set to re-run on a nightly job to ensure the data is kept fresh.

Code and wiki

The code behind and technical information about the Demonstrator is available from the GitHub site  and the demonstrator wiki. 

NRL technical specification

The NRL technical specification for consumers or providers to build against can be found on the NHS Developer API pages.

Further information

  1. internal

    National Record Locator for mental health trusts

    A mental health professional may be responsible for creating a patient’s care plan.  If this care plan can be used and seen by ambulance service staff it may help them if they are treating a patient in crisis.

  2. internal

    National Record Locator for ambulance services

    National Record Locator (NRL) will be able to alert you to patients under your care who have certain records, for example a crisis care plan, created for them. This is done by your local health care system searching the NRL for pointers (or bookmarks) to patient records indicating that a specific type of record now exists for the patient. 

Last edited: 26 July 2019 2:38 pm