Healthcare I.T in the big data space: Article 2 – Getting setup, touching some code

This is the 2nd article in this series, you can start with the 1st article if you need some context.

For the infrastructure, I began small.

1. I launched an Ubuntu ec2 instance
2. I installed a vnc  server on it so i could access the desktop from a vnc client on my Mac  – I plan to use this ec2 instance as my development machine
3. I installed mirth – I’ll need this to generate valid hl7 messages that I will feed into spring xd’s big data pipeline
4. I installed eclipse luna- to develop the spring integration modules that will be uploaded into spring xd.

My 1st use case is to create a hl7 feed and ingest it using spring xd, storing the messages in hdfs.

For the 1st development effort, I plan to create a mirth channel that reads hl7 from a database, sends it over tcp to a spring xd custom source module.
The mirth configuration is shown below

Source tab of the channel

Destination tab of the channel

For the spring xd to ingest the hl7, I have to create a custom source module as none of the out of the box modules will handle hl7 mllp protocol. This module will use a  camel hl7 endpoint to accept messages from mirth and then place these messages on a spring integration channel.

The plan is to eventually upload this spring integration module into spring xd. 1st things 1st. In eclipse I created a spring boot project. The configuration class / application class looks as follows:

This being the 1st iteration , Ian writing to file just to make sure the data is coming in, ad sure enough after I run the code in eclipse and start my mirth channel, I have hl7 messages dropping into my folder . Neat!!

Spring boot/integration /camel source code iteration 1 of the inbound hl7 to a file destination:

package com.wchr.xd;

import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.camel.CamelContext;
import org.apache.camel.builder.RouteBuilder;
import static org.apache.camel.component.hl7.HL7.ack;
import org.apache.camel.component.hl7.HL7MLLPNettyDecoderFactory;
import org.apache.camel.component.hl7.HL7MLLPNettyEncoderFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@SpringBootApplication
@Configuration
public class Application extends RouteBuilder {

	@Autowired
	CamelContext camelContext; 

	//private static CamelContext cmContext;

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
    	 SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    	// cmContext = context.getBean(CamelContext.class);
    	}

    @Bean
    public HL7MLLPNettyDecoderFactory hl7decoder(){
    	return new HL7MLLPNettyDecoderFactory();
    }

    @Bean
    public HL7MLLPNettyEncoderFactory hl7encoder(){
    	return new HL7MLLPNettyEncoderFactory();
    }

	@Override
	public void configure() throws Exception {
		// TODO Auto-generated method stub
		from("netty4:tcp://localhost:9000?sync=true&encoder=#hl7encoder&decoder=#hl7decoder")
		.to("file://inbound?autoCreate=true&fileName=${date:now:yyyyMMddHHmmss}.hl7")
		.transform(ack());
	}

}

snapshot of the inbound messages from my eclipse project