Practical FHIR notes on SDC form builders and terminology server implementations for healthcare integration teams.
Every FHIR team has implicit conventions about how Bundles get formatted. Every team also has "why does that file look different" conversations in code review. The gap between the two is time spent debating instead of shipping. Writing the...
A pretty-printer that handles indentation cleanly can still corrupt JSON if it mishandles escape sequences inside strings. Backslashes, unicode escapes, control characters, and forward slashes all have specific behavior rules. Getting them...
A 50 kb Bundle is trivial to pretty-print in memory. A 500 MB export Bundle is not. The formatter that loads the whole payload as a JavaScript object, walks it, and re-serializes will eat memory equal to several times the payload size, and...
A pretty-printer should never touch reference strings. Sounds obvious. In practice, formatters that normalize URL casing, resolve relative paths, or reformat urn:uuid: values silently break Bundle semantics. Reference integrity depends on...
Line-length choice sounds like a bike-shed argument. It becomes a real problem the first time a reviewer opens a Bundle diff in a two-panel code review tool and every fourth line scrolls horizontally. Reviewers who scroll do not review....
Bundles that live in version control — fixtures, examples, IG source, integration test data — deserve the same formatting discipline as source code. The formatter's job is not just readability. It is producing diffs that reviewers can...
Pretty-printing a Bundle should change the whitespace and nothing else. That is the rule. Formatters that helpfully reorder keys, entries, or arrays are not helpful — they turn a formatting operation into a semantic change, and every...
The compact FHIR Bundle that arrived on the wire is optimized for bytes. That is the right shape for transport. It is the wrong shape for every human who has to read it. Every incident where a developer opens a Bundle in a text editor and...