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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Node on FHIR

♥ Node on FHIR and want to get involved? Thanks! There are plenty of ways you can help!

Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue or assessing patches and features.

Testing Policy

Tests should be added for any major functionality that's submitted as a pull request. A lack of tests in the pull request are a qualifying reason to reject the merge request.

Using the issue tracker

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, features requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

  1. Use the GitHub issue search — check if the issue has already been reported.

  2. Check if the issue has been fixed — try to reproduce it using the latest master or development branch in the repository.

  3. Isolate the problem — ideally create a reduced test case and a live example.

A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report. What is your environment? What steps will reproduce the issue? What browser(s) and OS experience the problem? What would you expect to be the outcome? All these details will help people to fix any potential bugs.

Example:

Short and descriptive example bug report title

A summary of the issue and the browser/OS environment in which it occurs. If suitable, include the steps required to reproduce the bug.

  1. This is the first step
  2. This is the second step
  3. Further steps, etc.

<url> - a link to the reduced test case

Any other information you want to share that is relevant to the issue being reported. This might include the lines of code that you have identified as causing the bug, and potential solutions (and your opinions on their merits).

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the project's developers of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Pull requests

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Please ask first before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code, porting to a different language), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the project's developers might not want to merge into the project.

Please adhere to the coding conventions used throughout a project (indentation, accurate comments, etc.) and any other requirements (such as test coverage).

Adhering to the following process is the best way to get your work included in the project:

  1. Fork the project, clone your fork, and configure the remotes:

    # Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/node-on-fhir.git

# Navigate to the newly cloned directory
cd node-on-fhir

# Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/symptomatic/node-on-fhir.git

  2. If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:

    git checkout master
git pull upstream master

  3. Create a new topic branch (off the main project development branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:

     git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>

  4. Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project. Use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.

  5. Locally merge (or rebase) the upstream development branch into your topic branch:

    git pull [--rebase] upstream master

  6. Push your topic branch up to your fork:

    git push origin <topic-branch-name>

  7. Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.

We want to make sure that you have a handle on git, feature branches, pull-requests, and otherwise managing git based development flow before we invite you to collaborate on the code.

Hacking on NPM Packages

After you've begun diving into the code, you may find that you want to edit some of the user interface components. You will need to npm link the fhir-starter package.

git clone https://github.com/clinical-meteor/fhir-starter packages/fhir-starter  
meteor npm link packages/fhir-starter

We recommend doing all development of the fhir-starter library within the main application core/ConstructionZone.jsx page or on CodeSandbox.io or some similar service, and then submitting a pull request for publication. We currently do not support development of the fhir-starter library from within an Atmosphere package.

Lastly, you may need to re-link the package each time you make updates. :/ There is a rollup --watch command that you can use to ease this task; but its a bit brittle and easy to forget to run.

IMPORTANT: By submitting a patch, you agree to allow the project owners to license your work under the terms of the MIT License.

Coding Style Guide

  • Terseness causes obfuscation and errors. Spell out variable names. Don't use abbreviations.

  • Practice defensive programming with circut breakers and bulkheads. This begins by embracing the lodash get() function whenever you want to access a JSON object's field.

  • This is intended to be a 12 Factor App. As part of this design philosophy, config variables are exposed as environment variables. As such, all the application settings are stored in Meteor.settings which itself can be set via METEOR_SETTINGS at run time. Any sort of variable that might be specific to a specific client or installation should be brought in the Meteor.settings file. When in doubt, extract it out. Use get(Meteor, 'settings.public.foo') and feel free to add custom fields to the settings file. It's getting huge already, but that's okay. Be sure to document the new settings fields that you introduce.

  • Quotes vs double quotes - an over-rated argument. Start with double quotes, since it's required for creating valid JSON objects. Understand that double and single quotes can reference each other, and depending on the parsing, string building, or evals in your code you may need to switch between the two. We have this linting rule turned off. Be responsible.

  • Arrow functions vs function. Arrow functions and destructuring are nice, but are terse and difficult to follow and maintain. Use in this codebase is discouraged. There are many programmers rushing to the latest ES6 tutorials and trying to embrace all the latest programing syntax. Arrows have their time and place, but will be considered a sign of not having read the contributing guidelines.

  • Destructuring objects - props are one place where destructuring makes sense. In most other places, overuse of destructuring causes code to be difficult to read, and therefore difficult to maintain.

.meteor/packages

  • As of July 2023, we now keep a lock on the .meteor/packages file, so as to prevent project specific packages getting published on the main boilerplate template. We've tried pre-commit scripts and pre-release scripts, and neither managed to prevent project packages from getting written to the main template packages directory. So, lock file it is.

Pragmatically speaking, this means two things for developers. First, it encourages the use of the --extra-packages flag during development. When possible, try to do you your develop with syntax like so:

DEBUG=true meteor run --settings configs/settings.nodeonfhir.json --extra-packages clinical:example-package

However, the meteor deploy and meteor publish commands don't support the --extra-packages option. So, when deploying or publishing, we encourage creating a release branch with the release-, deploy-, and publish- prefixes. So, when preparing for an HL7 Connectathon or otherwise deploying to Galaxy, your typical workflow should look something like the following:

# create a feature branch
git checkout -b feature-foo

# do your develop; add features; debugg; etc.
DEBUG=true meteor run --settings configs/settings.nodeonfhir.json --extra-packages clinical:foo

# create a new deployment branch
git checkout -b deploy-connectathon-20240115

# add your packages, which will be written to .meteor/packages
meteor add clinical:foo

# now deploy your app
meteor deploy --settings configs/settings.nodeonfhir.galaxy.json foo-app.meteorapp.com

# go back to your feature branch
git checkout feature-foo

# push to github or gitlab and prepare merge request, when ready
git push origin feature-foo

# cleanup and delete the deploy branch when ready
# note that the deploy branch never gets sent back to the code repo
# nor does it get merged into the main repo
# it only exists so that we don't pollute the .meteor/packages file
git branch -D deploy-connectathon-20240115