Customizing node fhir server core Behavior

Customizing node-fhir-server-core Behavior

If you're looking to customize or modify the behavior of @asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-core for your node-fhir-server-mongo implementation, there are a couple of steps you'll need to follow.

1. Obtain local copies of node-fhir-server-core and node-fhir-server-mongo

node-fhir-server-core: git clone https://github.com/Asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-core.git

node-fhir-server-mongo: git clone https://github.com/Asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-mongo.git

2. Implement local node-fhir-server-core customizations

Make whatever modifications you need to the server and associated controllers and resources to your local copy of node-fhir-server-core. For example, this process was tested by making edits to the .toJSON() method in the patient resource class at ./node-fhir-server-core/src/server/resources/4_0_0/schemas/patient.js.

3. Add custom node-fhir-server-core to your node-fhir-server-mongo implementation

You'll need to change the dependencies in ./node-fhir-server-mongo/package.json. The dependencies section of the file will look like this (version numbers may be out of date in this example):

  "dependencies": {
    "@asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-core": "^2.0.5",
    "fast-json-patch": "^2.0.7",
    "moment-timezone": "^0.5.14",
    "mongo": "^0.1.0",
    "object-hash": "^1.3.1",
    "var": "^0.3.2"
  },

Edit the @asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-core dependency to point to your local copy of the code:

  "dependencies": {
    "@asymmetrik/node-fhir-server-core": "/YOUR/PATH/HERE/node-fhir-server-core",
    "fast-json-patch": "^2.0.7",
    "moment-timezone": "^0.5.14",
    "mongo": "^0.1.0",
    "object-hash": "^1.3.1",
    "var": "^0.3.2"
  },

Run yarn install to add the customized package to your node_modules.

NOTE: Every time you make additional changes/customizations to your local copy of node-fhir-server-core, you will need to delete the ./node-fhir-server-mongo/node_modules directory and re-run the yarn-install command.

For Docker Users

In order to propagate your customized package when running the server using Docker, you'll need to edit ./node-fhir-server-mongo/docker-compose.yml.

The volumes section of the file will look like this:

    volumes:
      - ./src:/srv/src/src

Edit it to look like this:

    volumes:
      - ./src:/srv/src/src
      - ./node_modules:/srv/src/node_modules

Now when you run your server using either yarn start or docker-compose up you should see the changes you made in node-fhir-server-core in action.