Difference between revisions of "WorldVistA KIDS Guidelines"

Revision as of 16:24, 22 November 2019

WorldVistA KIDS Guidelines

These Guidelines document the current practice of WorldVistA as of November 2019.

When changing Routines, the following actions must be done:

1. Changing the second line of the routine to include the words "WVEHR,LOCAL"
2. Before the change (and before the ;was; line mentioned next), there should be one or more comment lines marking the block of code that is changed. It is suggested they only be single semicolon comments.
   1. This must include the phrase "BEGIN WorldVistA Change"
   2. The date of the change should be included
   3. The initials of the person involved should be included, with the organization

      For example: David J Whitten working for WorldVistA would include "DJW/WV"

   4. It is best if the reason for the change is stated
3. Commenting out the old code with the prefix " ;was;" in front of the line.

   Note that this means the second semicolon is usually followed by a space (" ") unless it had a label, and in the case of a label on the line, the beginning of the text of the label starts immediately after the second semicolon.

   The new line will never have a label, so any change to a line with a label must re-introduce a line with the label.

   The single semicolon is used at the beginning of the line because these comments don't need to be copied over to the run-time representation of the code, which some people call the "object" code.

4. Next should be the lines of changed code
5. Finally there should be a line which has the phrase "END WorldVistA Change". Including the date, initials, and reason for the change are useful in this comment block, but not required.

Please use care in placing the above block of comments and code. If the line being changed includes dotted (".") lines, the proper number of dots should be placed BEFORE each of the lines being inserted. Failure to do this can cause working code to malfunction.