You may have a question about EasyHL7 vendor definitions and what they are used for. In a nutshell, the engine that drives this application involves loading HL7 messages correctly into memory and/or writing them correctly out to disk. The Vendor definition provides the engine with a structural guide to how the HL7 message should be loaded. The vendor definition contains a comprehensive definition of a particular VERSION of HL7. The definitions that come with this product out of the box are for versions 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 of HL7 which is probably more than adequate for your needs.
The thing to remember is that when loading pre-existing HL7 messages into memory the Vendor definition is very flexible. You can use a Version 2.2 HL7 Vendor definition to load 1000 Version 2.4 HL7 messages with no fear of data loss, or truncation, etc. The engine will load any unknown segments, data fields or field components correctly into memory but internally flag them as 'Unknown' if they don't actually exist in the vendor definition. This means that even if your messages contain multiple "Z??" segments (HL7 User Defined Segments) which are not part of the selected vendor definition, the engine will still correctly load them into memory with all of the data intact.
Database Implications: This program uses the vendor definition to decide which tables need to be created that make up the Schema (see creating tables). If an HL7 segment doesn't exist in the Vendor definition, then the program cannot create an underlying data table for it. This does NOT mean that data is lost. The data will always exist in the HL7 message itself which is stored in the <prefix>_HL7Data table.
For a detailed explanation of how to create / edit EasyHL7 vendor definitions click the button below to read the white paper.
