Iterative functions with the HL7 Kotlin DSL

As HL7 messages are compound structures, it should be possible to traverse them. Thus, the HL7 DSL offers the asIterable function for HL7 messages and groups in order to become iterable, so that e.g. all Iterable extension functions become applicable.

Due to their nested structures, iteration is implemented as a depth first traversal over all non-empty substructures, i.e. non-empty groups and segments.

    // Count the number of substructures
    var numberOfStructures = 0
    message.asIterable().forEach { numberOfStructures++ }

    // Check if there are any groups
    val hasGroups = message.asIterable().any { it is Group }

    // A list of the names of all substructures
    val allStructureNames = message.asIterable().map { it.name }

    // For loop
    numberOfStructures = 0
    for (structure in message) {
        numberOfStructures++
    }

    // Find the first nested OBX segment
    val obx = msg1.asIterable().find { it.name == "OBX" }

    // Find all nested OBX segments
    val obxList = msg1.asIterable().filter { it.name == "OBX" }

The find/filter methods are particularly useful together with smart navigation use cases:

• accessing data in a deeply nested message structure that is not visible in the pipe-encoded representation.
• uniformly accessing corresponding fields in messages with different structure
• messages that have a group structure in a newer HL7 version while having a flat structure in previous versions.