iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

Parsing a Batch of HL7 Messages

To parse a batch of HL7 messages, you must do the following:

• Write some code using a convenient FTP library or SMTP library to get the file of messages;
• Read the batch file into a string in memory;
• Write some simple string processing code to extract each individual message by picking up the MSH segment at the start of each message; and
• Invoke an instance of the Chameleon engine once for each message.

This does require that you be familiar with string and file processing libraries in your language of development, and that you know how to invoke the parse Message method on the Engine object of Chameleon.

For more information, browse the API Documentation for your specific programming language.

	One common mistake developers make is to forget to strip out just the message, which starts with MSH. If this happens, an exception message like "Header segment 'MSH' not present in message" will be thrown by Chameleon.