This Help is targeted toward the developers building HL7 interfaces into their applications. The MergeCOM-3™ .NET/C# HL7 Toolkit is a programmer's Application Programming Interface (API) for implementing HL7 interfaces. The major components of the toolkit include sending and receiving HL7 messages; encoding and decoding HL7 streams; translating messages (i.e., mappings); and sample utilities to demonstrate usage and provide useful applications.

The MergeCOM-3 .NET/C# HL7 Toolkit requires the following:

• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 or later (for developement)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later

Your developement environment (or at a minimum, your target environment) should run on a machine with Windows XP or later (32 or 64 bit).

You can configure the toolkit through a configuration file or, at runtime, through the configuration API in the HL7Toolkit class.

At startup, the toolkit reads its configuration from the hl7toolkit.properties file located in the current directory. If this properties file is missing, the toolkit uses default values for each configuration item. At runtime, an application can set or modify configuration items using the HL7Toolkit..::.Properties property. You can find a description of configuration items in the documentation of the HL7Toolkit..::.Properties property.

In addition to general configuration items, any items defined by the following classes can be defined at the toolkit level:

• HL7SocketConfiguration
• HL7ReceiverConfiguration
• HL7TransmitterConfiguration

These items provide the default values for items not explicitly set in instances of the mentioned classes. All default values are documented in this reference, except for the license key which does not have a default and must always be set.

The MergeCOM-3 .NET/C# HL7 Toolkit is composed of the main toolkit assembly and the HL7 standard assembly.

The main assembly implements non version-specific HL7 functionalities. It includes all core HL7 functionalities for all version 2.x standards, such as sending and receiving HL7 messages, parsing, constructing segments and fields, and so on. It also includes some additional functionalities, such as logging and configuration, which are also non version-specific.

The HL7 Standard assembly included with the toolkit contains all v2.x compliant classes. These classes may be utilized for constructing segments and fields and enable developers to address segments and fields in a consistent manner. The Standard libraries have dependencies on the core toolkit assembly.