The Entities Page provides access to management of entities functionality. The main page lists all the entities that have been defined on your instance. By default, when you install the software you get one entity called “Person Entity” that represents a person or patient. You can add a new entity by pressing the “Add Entity” button at the top right corner of the Entity Management page.
Checking the checkbox on the left of an entity to select it causes the button bar to emerge from the bottom of the the screen which gives you various options for manipulating the selected entity. The “Edit” button allows you to edit the configuration of an entity. The “Delete” button allows you to delete the selected entry after confirming the request. The “Export Schema” button allows you to export the entity definition to a local file that you can then import on another instance or use as the basis for a new instance. The “Export Records” button, upon confirmation of the operation, initiates a background operation to export all the records in the instance for that specific entity to a pair of files in the directory pointed to by the file-repository configuration parameter.
After selecting an entity and pressing the Edit button, you can customize the definition of an existing entity. At the entity level you can change the display name of the entity and the description of it.
In the table in the lower part of the screen you can edit the definition of an attribute or add a new attribute. The screen below shows an example of editing the definition of the entity attribute. You can change the display name and description of the attribute as well as whether the attribute is indexed, searchable, and case sensitive.
Indexed Attribute: when an attribute is marked as index, the system will create and maintain an index on this attribute which will result on much faster searches when this field is included in the search criteria (either through the UI or the REST API). Keep in mind that if you mark many fields as indexed, that will speed up the search operation for records but increase the amount of time it takes to update records as well as increase the amount of disk space that the database will consume for managing this entity.
Searchable Attribute: when an attribute is marked as searchable, the Search Page through the UI will include this attribute as one of the search criteria that you can specify when searching for records.
Case Insensitive: when an attribute is marked as case-insensitive, searching for records using this attribute as a search criterion will be case insensitive. For example, if the Given Name field is marked as case insensitive, searching for records with the Given Name value of Bob will return records with the value “Bob”, “BOB” or “bob”.
