iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

What is a Channel?

A channel is the central building block for an Iguana HL7 interface. With a single source and a single destination, it is your data's transport medium. The work that is done by each channel depends on the source and destination component. Suppose, for example, you have selected to have an LLP Listener as your source and a Database as your destination. What this means is that your channel will be accepting LLP-encoded HL7 messages (this is the standard for delivering HL7 messages over TCP/IP) by listening on a specific networking port. Your channel is then responsible for decoding these messages and mapping specified data out of them and into your destination database.

Channel Concept, with LLP Listener as the Source and Database as the Destination

The bulk of the work done from Iguana's user interface relates directly to channels. We use it to configure the source and destination components for our channels, we use it to start and stop our channels, we even use it to monitor the messaging activity across our channels. We will take a look at each of these tasks in detail in the following sections.