Home » Message Comparison
Message comparison helps you compare 2 sets of messages at the data level. This is useful in several cases, such as:
To compare a set of HL7 messages:
- Go to GAP ANALYSIS, Message Comparison…
- Click the Select messages to compare… zone
- Add the messages you want to compare. Messages can come from:
File: Click Add… to add one or several files containing messages
Database: Select a database to query and from which to retrieve messages.
Integration Engine: Select an integration engine data depot (Ensemble, Rhapsody, Iguana, Mirth and others) to retrieve messages directly from the integration engine (connector required).- Do the same for the other message set, clicking the other Select messages to compare… zone on the right.
Once the comparison is complete, differences are highlighted in red and the total number of differences between messages is displayed.
For a more detailed view of a message pair or message differences, double-click the message pair you want to compare. Navigate through the tree view, field by field, to see the differences.
Click on the gray zone at the bottom of the screen to view more details about each difference. Double-clicking on a grid row helps you navigate through the differences.
By default, messages will be compared based on their position. The first message on the left is compared with the first message on the right, the second with the second and so on.
Since message files don’t always contain the same amount of messages and/or messages are not necessarily always sorted in the same order, you can configure the application to match messages based on field values. To configure the message matching criteria:
Alternatively, you can:
You may want to exclude fields from the comparison so they are simply not considered in the comparison. This allows you to ignore differences in fields you don’t need to consider.
To exclude fields from comparison:
Alternatively, you can:
It can be easier to provide a list of fields to include instead of excluding a large number of fields. The procedure is similar. In the Filter tab, be sure Include (instead of Exclude) is selected.
To set a large number of fields in one operation, use the 1-on-1 message comparison screen. For example, if you want to compare fields PID.2 to PID.13:
The comparison will refresh using the new field set.
After the comparison is completed, message pairs can have one of the following statuses:
On the bottom left of the screen, the message pair count for each status is listed.
Message pairs can be shown/hidden based on their status. For instance, to hide identical messages:
Identical messages are filtered so only changed and unmatched messages are listed.
An Excel or PDF report can be generated to document the status of all messages. This report can be used, for instance, to document that the transformation code met all requirements at some point in time.
To generate this report:
The report contains:
Automatically apply changes | If checked, the differences will be calculated each time a significant setting has changed. |
Treat missing and empty fields as equivalent |
If checked, the algorithm will consider missing and empty fields as equivalent. Ex: ‘OBX||AD|||||’ and ‘OBX||AD’ will not be flagged as different. ‘PID|||||Smith^John^’ and ‘PID|||||Smith^John’ will not be flagged as different. |
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