Deploying an Onyx Questionnaire

This details what is required to deploy our onyx questionnaire. The first few paragraphs outline some of the major prerequisites and some minor complications in deploying across development and production environments.

These notes are open for discussion or improvement.

The Onyx Questionnaire and the PMI Lookup

Onyx uses a web service to access the Patient Master Index (the PMI). This web service is provided by the pmi-lookup. The Onyx questionnaire is currently installed alongside the pmi-lookup; ie: within the same instance of tomcat.

This seems sensible as we have only one questionnaire at the moment, and we don't know what it would entail to run more than one questionnaire at the same time. These ideas will have to be worked out in time. For the moment, we are sticking to using one tomcat instance. This is almost certainly more secure as the Obiba interface for the web service is not encrypted at present.

There is a development and a production version of the pmi-lookup. The production version uses an SqlServer table function invocation in JDBC to retrieve demographic data. For testing Onyx in a situation where SqlServer is not available, the development version uses a MySql database.

Prerequisite Installs

• JDK 1.6.*
• Tomcat 6.*
• MySql 5.5.* but see below

MySql

In our use of Onyx, MySql is required for storing questionnaire data. For production (live or test), the database is more likely to be on a database server; ie: an entirely separate install. This is somewhat complicated by the development version of the pmi-lookup, which uses MySql.

These notes assume that MySql is installed somewhere.

Webapp Locations

The webapps will be located in a well known directory outside of the tomcat directory; for example: /usr/local/briccs-webapps
The actual directory should be customizable. Henceforth this will be $BRICCS_WEBAPPS

Deploying PMI Lookup Production Version

The version 1.0 artifact is located at ​http://mvn.briccs.org.uk/org/bru/briccs/briccs-pmi-lookup/production-1.0/briccs-pmi-lookup-production-1.0.war

1. Unzip war file into $BRICCS_WEBAPPS/briccs-pmi-lookup-production-1.0
2. Locate config file at $BRICCS_WEBAPPS/briccs-pmi-lookup-production-1.0/WEB-INF/classes/pmi-lookup-config.properties
3. Edit the config file for database, user and password. There are appropriate templates in the config file.
4. Locate and edit log4j properties file at $BRICCS_WEBAPPS/briccs-pmi-lookup-production-1.0/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties
5. Place a context file for deployment within the tomcat tree: $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/patient-lookup.xml
6. Deploy within tomcat using manager commands of some sort.