The SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader (SDB Reader, SDBR, or "the reader," for short) is a Win32 application that performs back-office functionality for the overall SEURAT system. This application is designed to read ASCII files of a specified format and insert the data contained within into the Patient table of the SEURAT database (SEURDATA.MDB).

Files that are successfully read and parsed are deleted; files that are not successfully opened, read, or parsed are moved to another directory, specified by the user. Files that contain data that cannot be inserted into the database due to page locking of the Access database are moved to yet another directory, specified by the user, to be reattempted at a later time.

This document provides information on how to operate and support the SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader. It has been prepared based on production version 1.5.1.

The SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader is a Win32 application; as such, it requires a 32-bit Windows operating system to run (e.g., Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT). The account/machine which will run the reader must also have access to the directories in which (1) the production SEURAT database resides, and (2) the broadcasted demographic data files reside. Currently, the reader runs on a 90Mhz Pentium computer running Windows 95. It is logged into the YNHH2 server as user TELEFORM. The password is available from MIS staff at YNHH and will not be provided in this documentation, for purposes of security.

Diskettes are available from Medical Informatics for installing the SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader. These diskettes include a canned installation program which will install the necessary runtime files to supplement the application. The application executable itself will often be provided on an additional diskette. If so, once the installation is completed, the executable (READER.EXE) should be copied from the additional diskette to the application directory. It is strongly recommended that the application be loaded into the C:\SEURATDBR directory; undesirable operation make take place if the files are located elsewhere.

The reader executable file is READER.EXE. For sake of completeness, below are the files which are required to be located in the windows system directory (\WINNT\SYSTEM32 on a WinNT system, or \WINDOWS\SYSTEM on a Win95/98 system) for proper execution of the reader.

Files that are to be read by the reader must be in the following format:

• The field delimiter is the "[" character; thus, all fields must begin with this character.
• There is no record delimiter.
• Fields are padded with space characters when the length of their data is less than the fixed length for the field.
• The file is terminated by an ASCII end-of-file (EOF) character.
• The file can have a maximum of 142 characters, as specified by the field formats below:

The reader is executed by loading the READER.EXE file. The reader will automatically start processing unless you specify "noauto" on the command line. It is recommended that two shortcuts be created for the reader. Assuming that the reader is installed in the C:\SEURATDBR directory (which is recommended), the shortcut for automatic execution would call:

• C:\SEURATDBR\READER.EXE.

Operating under the same assumption as above, the shortcut for non-automatic execution would call:

• C:\SEURATDBR\READER.EXE noauto.

Once executed, the SDB Reader dialog appears, as below.

There are four file/directory text boxes that appear; each is described below. You may either enter the name of the file/directory in the text box provided, or select it using the Select button.

The icons that appear are described below:

The status bar at the bottom of the dialog contains two fields. The field to the left indicates the tracing status. If tracing is enabled, it will read "Trace Enabled". If not, it will read "Trace Disabled". The field to the right will display the data contained in the most recently processed demographics data file.

Click "About…" in the upper-right corner of the dialog will display information about the SDB Reader application, including its version number and copyright and contact information.

Once the appropriate files and directories have been defined, processing may begin. To start processing, press the Start button. The dialog will change slightly in that certain fields will now be unavailable, as shown below.

Once processing, only two options are available. You may either activate or deactivate the trace feature, or stop processing.

The SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader is a software program; as such, it is not immune to errors in operation. This is especially true due to its dependency on other computer systems. The SDBR program will fail if there is a network outage and communication with the server (YNHH2, currently) is disrupted; see Network Errors, below.

The program will also fail if an incorrectly formatted message is being processed. In this case, the application will continue to operate, but a message will appear in the error log file; see Error Log File, below.

Problems with the SDBR program typically manifest themselves at the user-level in the Pediatric PCC. The SDBR program is usually not monitored by IT personnel, so errors that occur are usually not discovered until the end-user reports an error. The usual complaint from the end-user, indicating a disruption in service on the part of the SDBR program, is that data is not available for patients who have already checked-in to the clinical (the "Patient not in table" dialog appears to the user). Oftentimes, the SDBR program may just be "stuck" and can be resumed by stopping and restarting processing (this can be done by pressing the Stop button, waiting until the traffic light icon changes to a green light, and then pressing the Start button to resume).

The SDBR program is designed to automatically recover after incurring an application error. When an error occurs in reading or processing data files, a line is written to the program's error log file. This is an ASCII file named ERROR.LOG and is located in the "BadFiles" directory.

Lines in the error log beginning with "PL:" indicate a problem has occurred in the ParseLine function of the SDBR program. This usually indicates that the file was unsuccessfully parsed, or that the attempted insert or update to the database was unsuccessful.

Lines in the error log beginning with "RF:" indicate a problem has occurred in the ReadFile function of the SDBR program. This usually indicates that the file was unsuccessfully read, due to either a file I/O error, incorrectly formatted data, or other operating system errors.

Line is the error log prefixed with "TM:" indicate that a problem has occurred with code executed by the internal program timer.

The SDBR program cannot, however, automatically recover from network errors due to limitations of the current network operating system. When a Novell NetWare network error occurs, a dialog box is likely to appear on the screen of the PC running the SDBR; the text in this dialog box will vary depending upon the error. In the event that such an error occurs, once it has been determined that the network is operational (the YNHH2 server is not down, for example), the PC running the SDBR program must be reset.

Trace is another feature for troubleshooting the overall SEURAT system. When activated, the trace feature generates a trace log file, detailing the activity of the SDBR processing algorithm. This is an ASCII file named TRACE.LOG and is located in the "BadFiles" directory with the error log file. The format of the trace log file is as follows:

followed by either:

or

In the event that only the first line appears for a given data file, then it can be assumed that an error has occurred on that data file. Reference the error log file to determine what is the problem.

The SEURAT Demographics Broadcast Reader is a Visual Basic 5.0 project. The source code resides under source control (Microsoft SourceSafe v5.0) on FONDUE, the YCMI departmental server.