SocketReader for MLLP and HL7 / News: Recent posts

Dear Community,

in this release, a bug has been fixed where FileReader threads would stop reading new messages from files after they hit a "Permission Denied" error. Now, FileReader threads will try again in the next cycle, until the file was successfully read. Only queues affiliated to a stalled FileReader thread were affected by this bug. All other threads and queues still worked as intended.

Please support us and our project by critizising, testing, reporting bugs and donating!... read more

Dear Community,

in this release, a bug has been fixed where, when both "ignorenacks" and "nacksonly" were set to True, an incoming NAK was written to the file system twice. If you do not use any debug options, this release has no effect on your installations.

Unit tests have been added to aid in testing socketReader. If you are interested, you are very welcome to write and submit additional tests.

Sincerely yours,
The socketReader Project Team

Dear Community,

the last release lacked of some vital functionality when making use of the new debug options. This bug has been fixed.

A new debug option "ignorenacks" is available for the Hl7Transmitter connector. When set to True, socketReader will, upon receiving a NAK, silently discard the NAKed message and continue with sending the next message in queue. When set to False, socketReader will resend the NAKed message until an ACK will be received for it.... read more

Dear Community,

this new version of SocketReader includes new options to activate / deactivate the use of acknowledgments as well as several debug options to help with network integration. Also, a bugfix is included which fixes a nasty fault making SocketReader use up all available file handles when it has run for an extended time. For older versions, a restart fixes the situation.

If you like to report a bug, contribute, comment or suggest, please send an email or drop a ticket.... read more

Dear Community,

a new version of socketReader is out.

SocketReader 1.0.4 is the first version including distinct versions for 32Bit and 64Bit operating systems. You will find both versions within the release packages for your OS. This will mostly benefit the Linux community which now can use an all-in-one executable file for 64Bit Linux systems.

Code changes include a minor bug fix regarding unreliable shutdown in some circumstances.... read more

Dear Community,

this release fixes a bug which manifested when fixing up messages.

BUGFIX: When transmitting via socket HL7 messages which do not have the fields MSH-15 and MSH-16, socketReader would partially crash upon writing values to them. This nasty bug has been fixed.

Sincerely yours,
The socketReader Project Team

Dear Community,

today, I was advised that the socketReaderService.exe would not run on MS Windows 7 64Bit. This is probably due to the pywin32 add-on I used to interface with the Windows Service API. The command line socketReader.exe seems to run fine, but it does not use the Windows Service API.

For the time being, I have no means to repackage and test socketReader for 64Bit Windows. Please use Linux or Unix instead or fall back to Windows 32Bit installations.... read more

Dear Community,

with this release, we fix a nasty bug which has been present since the very first release of socketReader:

BUGFIX: HL7-ACKs were not labelled as ACKs in MSH-9. This has been fixed.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Sincerly yours,
The socketReader Project Team

Dear Community,

we are proud to announce that socketReader has reached the Gold state. This is reflected by the version number 1.0.0.

This release is essentially the version 0.4.0 beta release which has been throughouly tested and verified. We did not find any critical errors or bugs nor did we receive any bug reports from you, the Community.

We hope that socketReader will continue to serve you as well as it did in the past! If you want to leave us a note of any kind, you may visit our guestbook at: ... read more

Dear Community,

the socketReader Project Team proudly announces the release of socketReader 0.4.0 (beta). With this release, a major milestone on the road to our first gold release has been reached.

This release features customizable message routing between the supported connectors. This means users can configure socketReader to receive messages from socket and write them to the file system -- and vice versa! On top of that, m:n routing is supported, meaning that multiple message sources can have their data delivered to multiple destinations. Many such communication paths can be configured and be used in parallel now by only one instance of socketReader.... read more

*** CRITICAL BUGFIX RELEASE ***
All users of socketReader 0.3.0 are strongly advised to upgrade to socketReader 0.3.1

Dear users,

unfortunately, the bug devil struck us. You can read about the details below.

Evaluation for the options createserversocket, ipaddr, usehl7 and outputdir was buggy. Because of this, default values were always assumed for these options.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.... read more

*** PLEASE READ THE CHANGELOG ***

This version introduces the config file. The only command line argument left is the --configfile CONFIGFILE switch which lets you state a path and name to your favourite configuration.

The functionality of this version is exactly the same as of version 0.2.8, so no bad surprises are to be expected.

We didn't implement the parallel full command line and config file approach as we estimated the overhead too large for almost no gain. To enable Win32 users to install socketReader 0.3.0 along with earlier versions for easier migration, the internal service name was changed.... read more

Dear users,

socketReader has been a plain command line tool from its very beginning. Time has passed and lots of new options have been implemented to satisfy emerging demands on flexibility. the project has now reached a state where the old fashioned way of use needs to be revamped to allow for even greater flexibility.

In the future, this will enable new crucial functionality, such as writing multiple socket streams to different directories or sending file contents via socket. Therefore, we have decided to move the socketReader configuration into a config file, away from the command line. The only command line argument accepted will be the location and name of the config file. ... read more

*** PLEASE READ THE CHANGELOG ***

There are some clinical software products on the market which do not sort file names in the correct semantic manner. This would eventually cause messages not being imported in-order. socketReader implements a workaround for this by padding leading zeros to the file iterator. This iterator is now a fixed length 5 digit number starting at 00000 every new second. This way 100k messages can be received within a second before the counter wraps over and files get overwritten.

Trackers for Bug Reporting and general feedback have been added to this project. You can access them via this link:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=316605

*** PLEASE READ THE CHANGELOG ***

socketReader had its Python base framework switched to Stackless Python 2.7.1. The HL7-based file naming mechanics have been altered to include the message destination and source systems and facilities (MSH-3 to MSH-6) in the file name prefix.

*** PLEASE READ THE CHANGELOG ***

socketReader is now available as a native Win32 service. You can find it as a new executable (socketReaderService.exe) in the Win32 releases. You also can run the service directly from the Python source file (socketReaderService.py). Since there can only be one service with the same identifier on the same machine at the same time, there would effectively be a limit of one interface per machine. Therefore, the HL7-based file naming mechanics have been expanded to also include the message source system and message source facility (MSH-3 and MSH-4) in the file name prefix. This way, a file search can easily determine the subset of valid data files for a listening application. For non-HL7 data you are indeed limited to one communications interface per machine. When using the option --hl7prefix, your files will now look like SYSTEM_FACILITY_MSGTYPE_timestamp_iterator.postfix, for example: "ORBIS_UKD_ADT_20101102124510_0.hl7". ... read more

*** KNOWN BUG ***

A bug is hitting the Python 2.6.5 logging libs rendering log rotation dysfunctional. SocketReader is falling back to a plain solid file wich never rotates until this bug has been resolved.

NOTE: Writing of messages has not been affected in any manner by this bug!

*** CRITICAL BUGFIX *** SocketReader's socket client mode was bugged since May, 7th when all python socket methods were encapsulated. The socket server mode was not affected. This bug has been resolved with this release.

*** PLEASE READ THE CHANGELOG *** A new option --newline has been introduced. If this option is given, a "\n" (newline) character will be appended to each message written to a file. This was the standard behavior of socketReader until version 0.2.2 (beta). NOTE: In order to keep the behavior of socketReader 0.2.2, you _must_ give the option --newline from now on! Otherwise no newline character will be appended to messages written to file. There is also a known bug regarding access to the log file. When under heavy load, socketReader might not write complete log messages to the file on rare occasions, although the Python docs state the logging module to be thread safe. Wrapping this operation by using threading.Lock() yielded the same result, so I suspect the bug to be there.

SocketReader now uses the python logging engine to produce auto-rotated log files upon request. The log level can optionally be adjusted

Changelog:

(1) BUGFIX: socketReader would not tidy up upon issuing SIGTERM on it. This has been fixed.

(2) DOC: Added a chapter on "Deamons"

(3) Added option -P (--prefix) to enable definition of static file prefixes.

(4) Added option --hl7prefix to generate the prefix for each file from MSH-9-message_type of the current HL7 message.

Due to my inability to properly configure the SourceForge Web Interface for easy use (I'd gladly appreciate any help here), please submit any bug reports or feature requests directly to me via email (see README.txt included in any archive). Thanks, Sebastian

This release contains the following changes: (1) BUGFIX: omitting the optional switch --ip while using -s did not default to the machine's primary NIC. This has been fixed. (2) LICENSE: This software has been upgraded to use the GPLv3.0 license. You will find it bundled in any archive you download from here.