The purpose of this app is to manage and display statistical data for the patients in a few different ways. The data is retrieved from SMART, but depending on the SMART server version, you may also be able edit the records or new ones.
There are three ways of representing the data – as charts, as table and the so called Parental View, which is intended for the parents of the child, or. for people that does not have in-depth medical knowledge.
The most complex of those views is the charts view because it provides unique set of features:
- It can display multiple charts together, keeping them well ordered, no matter what the data is.
- It has “time navigation” and even a zoom feature, allowing you to move in different portions of the data.
- It can display three types of data together (the patient measurements plus up to two data sets). This allows you to compare the patient data with some statistical average.
- It has an interactive selection, meaning that you can click somewhere on the canvas to select a point in time and see the details about the records near that time. You can also move the mouse over another point(s) and compare them with the current selection.
How the settings are stored
When the application loads, it first reads it’s settings from the configuration file “smartapp/js/gc-chart-config.js”. Then it looks for updated version of that settings at the browser’s local storage (internal storage space that the browsers provides for each page to store some data). Finally, if the app is connected to SMART, it will look for preferences that are stored online and automatically sync. with them (it uses the SMART preferences API, which allows you to store custom data). That results in graceful degradation behavior:
- If you are connected to SMART - the settings are online (per user)
- If you are NOT connected to SMART - the settings are offline (you may have different settings for any browser and computer)
- If you are using too old browser or have the localStorage disabled - The app only uses the config file (and cannot write to it). Even if you change the settings via UI, they will be discarded after page reload.
Updating the source of the app requires advanced JavaScript knowledge. However, if you want to do that, the best place to start would be the settings of the application. There are many settings in the “Advanced Settings” dialog, and that is just a small subset of the actual configuration. The actual settings are located in the file “smartapp/js/gc-chart-config.js”. If you decide to edit the settings manually, you must increment the number at “readOnlySettings.fileRevision” (at the same file), otherwise the app will not recognize the file as newer than the remote setting (if any).
If you want to add new statistical data set, that can be done in the file “smartapp/js/gc-charts-data.js”, following the existing pattern for the already available data sets.
New demo patients can be added, or the existing ones edited in the file “smartapp/js/gc-sample-patients.js”.
The string translations (English / Spanish) can be changed in the file “smartapp/js/gc-translations.js”.
There is a large collection of helper functions, classes and jQuery and Raphael plugins, some of which are easy to understand and modify.
Finally, here is a brief description of some of the other files and objects.
The Table View is crated by the code in “smartapp/js/gc-grid-view.js”. The Parental View is crated by the code in “smartapp/js/gc-parental-view.js”. The files “smartapp/js/gc-app.js” and “smartapp/js/gc-smart-data.js” are responsible for creating the application and the patient(s). They are doing the “dirty work” and editting them is not recommended.
The Charts View is controlled by instance of the ChartPane class from “smartapp/js/chart-pane.js”. That instance contains (and controls) some charts. These charts are created bt the Chart classes at “smartapp/js/charts/”. They all inherit the base class at “smartapp/js/chart/chart.js”, which actually handles most of the drawing tasks.
The XDate library instance used in the app contains a custom fix related to the date use in windows opened by the app. (https://github.com/medapptech/smart_growth_charts/commit/56270b92f646484539ca272e4508daaec450c6d7) In the event that the library needs to be upgraded with a new version, this fix may need to be reapplied.
The application should run on any operating system. The only requirements are about the browser that hosts it. For best performance use Google Chrome. The following browsers should be compatible:
- Internet Explorer 8+ (version 8 NOT recommended but it works)
- Safari 5.1+
- Firefox 18+
- Google Chrome 24+
- Opera 12.1+
Also, the following browser features must be enabled:
- JavaScript must be turned on
- The localStorage and cookies needs to be enabled
- The popup windows (at least for the app domain) must be enabled, or the print preview popups won't open.
- On Windows, Internet Explorer cannot display the pages properly if the OS zoom is not set to 100% (Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display)