[4suite] Associating payments with charges...

[Uche Ogbuji]

Marc wrote:

> First of all, I'd like to make sure I'm posting this in the right
> place... this is a fairly dumb question about Amara usage; am I in the
> right forum?

For Amara 1.x use the 4Suite mailing list:

http://lists.fourthought.com/mailman/listinfo/4suite

This mailing list is for the next generation of the projects.

[SNIP]

> My problem is that I can't see any way, in the original file,  to
> associate the "creditpay" and "creditadj" records with the appropriate
> charges.  They follow directly after, but they're not linked.  So
> right now I'm ignoring them completely, and simply passing through the
> summary information from the charge record.  This is not acceptable,
> however, as the patients will want to see payment details and dates...

Can you always rely on their coming immediately afterwards?

> Do I need to learn SAX to do this, or is there some nifty Bindery
> trick I can use?

Should be pretty easy using Bindery, as long as you know what patterns 
to expect.  If I'm getting the gist of your format here's what I would 
personally do to keep it more in the Python world and less in the XML world:

* Use pushbind with "row" as the pattern.  This will give an iterated 
series of rows
* Iterate over row.xml_child_elements
* Use iterrools.groupby to group by the XPath pattern 
child.xml_xpath(u"preceding-sibling::charge[1]")
** If you aren't comfy with itertools magic, you can just use a nested 
for loop tracking the current charge element as you go through the children

You should now have everything conveniently grouped, and can proceed to 
compute the aggregate output info.


> Also, the clearinghouse I'm sending this to apparently doesn't want
> "encoding=" in the header (although I suspect that it's not really a
> problem - there were so many other errors that their interpreter just
> barfed.)  Just in case it is a problem, how can I suppress that so I
> only get
> "<?xml version="1.0"?>"

Their request is pretty counter to XML convention, so your only option 
is raw text post-processing.  You can omit the entire declaration, if 
that works.


>> Do I need to learn SAX to do this, or is there some nifty Bindery
>> trick I can use?
>>     
>
> A few hours later, I thought I'd clarify:
> 1)  from my understanding of what SAX is and does, it sounds ideal for
> my purposes.  I would iterate through "row"; when I receive a "charge"
> event I start building a "charge" record in my output; as I receive
> "creditpay" and "creditadj" events I create "payment" records in the
> output and append them to the ongoing "charge"; when I get another
> "charge" event, or hit the end of "row", I tie off the current
> "charge".  Much the same as I would do if I were processing a flat
> text file, no?
>   

You can do this in Amara using pushbind.  You can also do it in plain 
bindery.  You shouldn't need SAX at all for what you want, and SAX is 
truly a pain to deal with.

> 2) could that procedure be combined with the Domlette-style (don't
> know what else to call it) approach I've used for the rest of the file
> - in other words, can I pass in a chunk of previously-parsed XML, or
> would I need to use SAX from top to bottom?
>   

pushbind is actually just like that: an iterator providing a series of 
bindery chunks.

> 3) I've looked at the tenorsax example four or five times now and I'm
> still not sure I "get" it.  It makes me feel like I'm playing Nethack
> - "Stop!  You are not yet sufficiently experienced to adventure
> here!"  I hate to ask, but could someone add just a few more comments
> to it, to make it clear to a SAX n00b like me just what it's doing at
> each step?
>   

You shouldn't need Tenorsax.  FWIW it will probably cease to exist in Akara.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                       http://uche.ogbuji.net
Founding Partner, Zepheira        http://zepheira.com
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