Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.

This is a mantra that I follow religiously. Originally it was taken from one of my favorite books; The subtle art of not giving a f*ck.

When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working in it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head”

― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

This is the 2nd week of my GSoC Project. I set up the module and DHIS2. Now what? so many questions spinning around my head. Where to start? What is a report definition? How to send the data to DHIS2? A data element in DHIS2? Dataset?

I had to start from somewhere; First I tried to add some data and manually to DHIS2 because I thought it would be somewhere good to start. I had to do a hell a lot of experiments and go through DHIS2 documentation to understand what is a Dataset, a Data Element, and how they work. It was more than meets the eye!

Things got easy after signing up for the DHIS2’s community forum. I found some discussions on OpenMRS — DHIS2 integration which was a couple of years ago but they were so helpful for me to understand the common issues. There were some helpful resources too, which guided me to configure the module. After spending hours and hours on the module; finally, now I’m ready to post!

There was a button to post data to DHIS2. Click…..! Loading…..! POW! It crashed!!

Then I had to debug to identify the problem. The content-type was incompatible with DHIS2. I fixed it and tried to post data. Woah! It crashed again! This time it was due to an incompatibility with the response payload mappings. Also, I had to fix the UI too…

After fixing an error after an error; finally, I was able to reach the success screen!!

I sent a Pull Request with the fixes for the above issues: https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-module-dhisreport/pull/69

More details on the issue:

DHIS2 Reporting module crashes when trying to post

Tickets I worked on:

Fix errors which occur when trying to post data to DHIS2

Change the content type of the postAdxReport payload

Fix incompatibleJAXB mappings according to the response payload of DHIS2's dataValueSets API

The report result page displays an error after posting data to DHIS2

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