Sep 17, 2018 - HAPI FHIR 3.5.0 Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.
This release is happening a little bit later than we had hoped. This release features a complete reworking of the way that search indexes in the JPA server work, as well as a new database migration tool that can be used to miograte to a new version of HAPI FHIR. Testing these features ended up taking longer than we had hoped, but we think it will be worth the wait.
As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes. Notable changes include:
- HAPI FHIR now works correctly and is tested on Java 9 and 10, and continues to support Java 8. Java 9 introduces a new module system that meant a lot of additional testing and build tweaks were required in order to get HAPI FHIR working on that platform. Future migrations do not look like they will be as difficult, and we anticipate supporting current release versions of Java as they come out.
- A new databasse migration tool has been added to the HAPI FHIR CLI. This tool allows administrators to automatically upgrade an existing database schema from a previous version of HAPI FHIR (currently only HAPI FHIR 3.4.0 is supported) to the latest version. See the command documentation for more information.
- The JPA server mechanism for indexing resources has been completely reworked to index based on complex hashes of data. This change should have no user-visible effects, but it does reduce the total size of the database and improve search performance in many cases. It also lays the groundwork for some other features we have planned, including native JPA server multitenancy and column-level encryption.
- Performance in the JPA server has been significantly improved when fetching large pages of data (e.g. search results or history operations containing 100+ resources in one page). This work comes thanks to a collaboration between HAPI FHIR and the US National Institutes for Health (NIH).
- Support for LOINC has been further improved, thanks to an ongoing collaboration between HAPI FHIR and the Regenstrief Institute.
Note that this version does not include an updated set of FHIR R4 resources. The previous versions are still included. This is because the latest resources have a number of changes that break the HAPI FHIR build in fairly fundamental ways (e.g. compartment definitions have changes to using a FHIRPath expression that requires a resource resolution, a new validation rule has been added to require narratives across the board, etc.). Work is ongoing on addressing these changes, but as a result we decided to not delay the release any further. A point release should be available soon with updated definitions.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!