PDC Simulator

PDC Simulator is a tool to replace the Patient Demographic Consumer on a test instance. This tool can participate as an initiator in many tests, like PDQ_Exact_Name test. PDC Simulator has a GUI that helps to configure and manage this simulator. So we can specify the HL7 query to send as a consumer, we can visualize suppliers' configuration which communicate with the PDC Simulator. Also we can view the messages sent and received by this tool.
PDC Simulator can interact with gazelle using web service methods.

PDC Simulator's communication with gazelle

This sequence diagram represents steps needed using web service methods of PDC Simulator to launch a test with a system supplier:

Like all simulators, gazelle use the method startTestInstance of the PDC web service, to start a new test with the PDC Simulator. Then, gazelle send the configuration of the system under test, which is a patient demographic supplier. Because PDC Simulator is an initiator, gazelle use the method sendMessage to force the PDC Simulator to send a HL7 query to the SUT. Using the configuration of the SUT sent by gazelle to the simulator, this tool sends the HL7 query and receive the response (ACK) of the SUT. These two messages are saved on the database of the simulator, and we can access to these message using the GUI of the PDC Simulator. Gazelle can use the method getMessage of the PDC Simulator to verify if the message was well received.

Installation and documentation

You can download sources of PDC Simulator from the forge of INRIA. To install PDC Simulator you have to download two projects, which are PDQPDCSimulator and GS-Common. Their links on the forge are: https://scm.gforge.inria.fr/svn/gazelle/branches/simulators/PDQPDCSimulator and https://scm.gforge.inria.fr/svn/gazelle/branches/simulators/GSCommon-ejb.

The java documentation of this project is available here.