Program Links Parameters

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Ardavan
Posts: 106
Joined: Sat May 15, 2010 9:10 am

Program Links Parameters

Post by Ardavan » Thu Sep 18, 2014 10:39 pm

Hello everybody,

Thank you developers for the great product and thank you community for all the great ideas and contributions. This is my first time posting a new topic here so I hope it's on the right board. We use Visix to capture images from our ScanX machine, however we aren't always on top of exporting the captured images back into open dental. To further complicate matters, we aren't even on top of inputing patient's names correctly, so sometimes the patient's A-Z folder doesn't exactly correlate to their correctly updated name on file, and hence I can't be guaranteed to land in a patient's A-Z folder by constructing a path using [LNAME][FNAME][PATNUM].

I have tested that images dropped in a patient's ImageFolder are picked up by open dental and displayed within the images module (very cool). I am imagining a script which copies images from the imaging software into the patient's A-Z folder. To this end it would be very helpful if I could pass the parameter [ImageFolder] as a command line argument when launching a program link. This may also help Imaging software developers to better integrate with open dental by automatically exporting images back into the patient's chart in open dental.

It just occurred to me while writing this that I could track the folder down by parsing folder names for patnum using the [PatNum] parameter, however as you could imagine that would unnecessarily utilize resources and is therefor less than elegant. Unfortunately I've seen instances where not even the first characters of the names were correct, so I can't rely on speeding up the search by looking for the patnum within [LNameLetter]* folders.

So to summarize, it would be great if a command line argument of [ImageFolder] could pass the value of the ImageFolder field within the patient table when launching program links.

Thank you.

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jsalmon
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Joined: Tue Nov 30, 2010 12:33 pm
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Re: Program Links Parameters

Post by jsalmon » Fri Sep 19, 2014 10:12 am

We've had this subject brought up before by other developers. Every workaround I can think of turns into a nasty hack. I went ahead and created an entry in our proposed features list for this new parameter.

We've even had customers ask for the opposite side of the fix which would be to rename the folders when the patient name changes; request #730
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.

Jason Salmon
Open Dental Software
http://www.opendental.com

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