Business Rules Validation

Healthcare integration these days isn’t only about HL7 integration. PilotFish offers modern and robust solutions that enable data integration between any and all systems, applications, databases, and operating systems and platforms, notwithstanding the need to support the latest new technology, legacy systems, or both.

Data validation is often limited to checking the structure of an XML document and the data types contained therein. The application consuming the XML, however, must not only be able to parse the incoming XML but to process the transaction.

In order to ensure that an XML message can be consumed by an application endpoint, more robust business rule validation may be required.

The eiConsole’s Validation Editor is a graphical environment for describing a hierarchy of business validation rules that will be applied to an XML instance document.

There are two types of nodes in a tree-based “validation model”:

• XPath Nodes specify an XPath expression used to select a node set from the XML document.
• Validation Rule Nodes are attached to XPath Nodes and specify which Validator should be used to validate the elements, attributes, and values in the XPath’s node set.

The Validation Editor includes a library of common “validator” components, each represents a type of business rule validation. As is the case throughout the eiConsole, the list of available Validator can be extended with custom Java classes.

Out-of-the-box validation capabilities include:

• XML Schema (XSD) Validation
• Schematron Validation
• XSLT Validation
• Regular Expressions / Pattern Matching
• Field Length
• Enumerated Value Lookup
• Database Lookups
  • Ensure that a key/ID in the inbound XML matches a key/ID in the target system
  • Ensure that a value from an enumerated field in the inbound XML matches a value contained within a lookup / pick-list table
  • Ensure that multiple related values from the inbound XML are consistent with the corresponding records in the application database
• External Reference Data Check
  • Ensure that information in the inbound XML file is consistent with an auxiliary document (e.g., text, XML, spreadsheet)

Once a set of business validation rules have been created, it is used to validate incoming XML instance documents.

Business Rule validation may occur only during the initial phases of a project, or for every production transaction. The results of the validation processor may be reported in a human-readable report or as machine-readable error response (e.g., a SOAP Fault message with detail).