Request Model Plug-ins

PopMedNet™ Release 3.1 introduced a new plug-in framework for extending the number and type of requests that may be supported by the network.  The plug-in framework abstracts the concept of a query into a more general Request that is submitted to one or more DataMarts that execute the request and return a Response.  Requests contain a header that is common to all requests and zero, one, or more Documents that comprise the request.  Responses have a header that is common to all responses, and zero, one, or more Documents that comprise the response.  A Document is a binary stream that is marked with a mime-type containing data, such as a table of patient counts serialized into a data stream, text file, html file, or virtually any type of office document such as a Word document, Excel Worksheet, image file, or even a program file.

There are several types of plug-ins that may be integrated into PopMedNet™ as follows:

• Native Plug-ins – tightly integrated ASP.NET MVC 3 components that implement the native plug-in interfaces
• Remote Plug-ins – loosely integrated external websites that provide query composers,  developed in virtually any technology, that can compose queries outside of the PopMedNet portal and route them to PopMedNet networks via a secure web service gateway
• Redirect Plug-ins – loosely integrated external websites that provide query composers in developed in virtually any technology where queries are initiated within PopMedNet™ and use a HTTP redirect bridge to switch between PopMedNet and the foreign application.

Note: See Lincoln Peak for information on how to develop plug-ins for PopMedNet.  

The following sections provide an overview of the existing native Request Model Plug-ins that have been developed for PopMedNet.  

Supported Query Types (Requests)

The system currently supports a number of query types:

• Summary Queries - Menu-driven queries that execute against summary tables
• ESP Queries - Menu-driven queries that execute against ESP databases
• File Distribution Queries – Requests used to exchange documents between the portal and DataMarts
• SQL Distribution Queries – Requests used to distribute raw SQL code between the portal and DataMarts
• Remote Query Composers – Queries composed from a number of external applications, such as I2B2 and hQuery, that use an interface native the application to compose the query and submit it to a PopMedNet network