Segment Properties

Column	Purpose
Name	The name of the field in the segment. You can edit the names of the segment fields in the Segment Definition window, or the Table Mapping window.
Data Type	The data type indicates which composite is used to define the grammar of this field. You cannot use primitives (such as a Double or String) as a Data Type of a field in a segment. You always have to use composites (such as ST for a String and NM for a Double).
Required	This indicates if the field in the segment is mandatory or optional. When parsing a message, this property is only applicable when Strict Grammar Checking is checked in the Misc tab of the Options window.
Repeats	Indicates maximum number of times that different field values appear in the field. Use 0 if you are interested in the first value only, and use a number greater than zero if you have to extract more than the first value from the field. When parsing a message, this property is only applicable when Strict Grammar Checking is checked in the Misc tab of the Options window.
Inbound and Outbound Scripts	Chameleon provides you with a Python scripting option to pre/post process the message components before the message is mapped to the tables accessible from the application. For more information, see Python Scripting.
Validation Rules	Validation Rules represent validation that is performed on a message at the segment level. Note that multiple fields of a segment can be used to determine a message's validity. For more information, see Validation Rules.

Repeating Fields

Each field can contain multiple values or multiple representations of the same value. Multiple values are separated by a separation mark (~ for HL7). For example, 'person name' may repeat a number of times, each time representing the 'name' in the different language.

Hillerod^John~Hilleraad^John, this example shows the name as it will be exported by the application that uses English and Danish representations of the patient name internally.

If you need to access the Danish name from the above example in using Chameleon, you have to set the 'Repeats' column for this field to 1 (1 repeat = 2 values). Then when mapping 'patient name' fields to the fields of your table, select fields from Patient Name(XPN)[1] composite.

Note that the count of values in the field starts from [0], so Patient Name(XPN)[1] is the second appearance of the patient name, not the first.

iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

Segment Properties