Configuring Receivers

Once you’ve defined the interface, it is necessary to set up receivers so that the interface can act on messages sent to the HL7 Mediator by other systems. From the interface dashboard, click on Add Receivers.

Clicking this button gives you a list of receiver types (File Receiver, TCP/IP Receiver, and Flow Receiver).

File Receiver

The file receiver gets messages from a disk drive and starts the processing of the message. The properties for a file receiver are:

1. Name – The name of your receiver.  It is important to name receivers well if you plan to have many sources of messages for this interface. 
2. Description – a free text description to help you and others who maintain this interface understand the purpose of this receiver.  This is a great place to provide details about the message source or contact information for the maintainer of that message source.
3. Enabled – You can enable and disable individual receivers by changing this setting.
4. Folder to monitor – the most important setting on a file receiver is the actual file system folder from which this receiver will draw messages. This can be a full local path like C:\hl7 in\hospital1 or it can be a UNC path like \\HL7Server\AllMessages\Hospital1
5. Send ACK when processing complete – This tells the HL7 mediator to send an ACK message back to the other system when the message has been successfully parsed.  Because the HL7 mediator can assign tasks to humans and do long running workflow processes we do not wait for the message to be fully processed by the mediator before sending back an ACK message.

   NOTE: If your requirements necessitate sending an ACK message to another system later in the process you can simply do this at the point you specify in your processing flow.

6. Archiving – These settings allow you to specify alternative folders where processed and errored versions of the messages can be stored. Even without these options the Decisions HL7 Mediator will track successful and unsuccessful messages in the database for reporting purposes. 
7. Calendar – The calendar allows you to specify how frequently this receiver will look for new messages at the specified location. There are many options for the calendar.  Most of these options speak for themselves, but a description is provided for a couple of them.  Timespan has an asterisk because it is the most commonly used option. a. Daily – occurs daily. b. First Day of Month – occurs on the first day of the month. c. Last Day of Month – occurs on the last day of the month. d. Monthly – occurs once a month. e. Specified Job – This allows you to set a specific date and time to run the interface. It will run at that one point in time and not again.  f. *Timespan – This allows you to set an interval between checks from 1 second to 1 year.  The receiver will start immediately and check whenever the interval has passed. g. Weekly – occurs once a week. h. Yearly – occurs once a year.

Once a receiver is created, it displays on the interface dashboard.

TCP/IP Receiver

If the system sending you messages supports TCP/IP connections, these can be configured as a TCP/IP receiver. TCP/IP receivers get messages as soon as they are sent from the sending system so there is no need to configure a schedule. The properties of a TCP/IP receiver are as follows:

1. Name – The name of your receiver.  It is important to name receivers well if you plan to have many sources of messages for this interface.
2. Description – a free text description to help you and others who maintain this interface understand the purpose of this receiver.  This is a great place to provide details about the message source or contact information for the maintainer of that message source.
3. Enabled – You can enable and disable individual receivers by changing this setting.
4. IP Address – The IP address on which this receiver should listen.  (Leaving this setting blank allows the receiver to listen on any valid IP address for this server.)
5. Port – The port number for the socket on which this receiver should listen.  This must be a valid port for the receiver to initialize and start receiving messages.
6. Override Standard Low Level Message Indicators (Message Framing) – TCP/IP connections use special text characters to indicate when a message is complete.  If you need to customize these you may do so by enabling this option. NOTE: The characters must be entered using ‘Hex’ notation for example: 0x0B
7. Send ACK when processing complete – This tells the HL7 mediator to send an ACK message back to the other system when the message has been successfully parsed.  Because the HL7 mediator can assign tasks to humans and do long running workflow processes we do not wait for the message to be fully processed by the mediator before sending back an ACK message.  NOTE: If your requirements necessitate sending an ACK message to another system later in the process you can simply do this at the point you specify in your processing flow.
8. Never Close Connection (non standard clients) – Some clients, like 7-Edit the popular HL7 editing application, require that the server maintain an open connection after it has first been established.  If you find that your receiver gets a single message and then stops receiving you can try enabling this setting.
9. Use File System As a queue – If your HL7 interface cannot process messages as fast as they are being sent to the interface you can use the file system as a ‘queue’ to store messages so that you do not block the messages from getting sent over the TCP/IP connection.
10. Always Trim Standard Frame Chars – This setting tells the parsing engine to always be sure to strip any standard message framing characters (as described above) from the messages received.

Flow Receiver

The most flexible receiver of all is the flow receiver.  The flow receiver can do anything that the Decisions workflow engine can do. For more details on this please see our standard user documentation on our Flow Designer.

Additional Resources

• Integrating Decisions with External Oracle Database