Existing Wording: build process

Comment:

We need to re-examine whether using Excel spreadsheets is the best method for profiling. Our experience reveals the following: (1) It is slow and error-prone. (2) There is no way to compare across versions (diff doesn't work). (3) You can't easily search or find and replace across multiple files. (4) Cutting and pasting screws up formatting and data validation. (5) Each file has to be individually opened, edited, and closed. It took the QICore team over 500 person-hours to create the approximately 30 (very simple) QICore profiles. MITRE's recommendation is to completely change the way profiles are specified: You should be able to put your profiles into an integrated development environment like Eclipse and manage your profiles development as a project. The base resources and extensions should be brought in as fixed libraries. There should be a file hierarchy that groups similar files, e.g., /extensions, /valuesets, /profile-diffs, /examples. You should be able to use a normal text editor. The profile-diffs should be defined using the simplest possible declarations. The "build" should simply create the profile XML from the project files, and putting the result in /profiles. It should be local and self-contained. Producing documentation should be a separate process entirely, based only on the "compiled" profile XML in the /profile directory.