MEDITECH Reports

Why Do MEDITECH NPR Reports Crash?

Tweet

 

Why do MEDITECH NPR Reports crash? There are quite a few reasons your NPR reports can crash; but today I want to focus on the local symbol table. Crashing due to symbol table overflow can be hard to pin down. The reason is due to the variable nature of the information your report, attributes or screen load into the local symbol table from record to record.

Everytime you use a variable without a prefix (:,#,!,%) you are loading that information into a very small memory space called the symbol table. Local symbol table variables look like this: A, B, X, ANS.

== Local Symbol Table Limitations ==
The local symbol table has a 1024 byte limit. MEDITECH screens and reports use the local symbol table. If you load enough small amount of information into the local symbol table: "Caffeine"^ALLERGY, "Mother"^NOK, "123-45-6789"^SSN; your screen or report can crash at random.

I have found that using /SLASH variables almost exclusively to store my information when I'm programming a MEDITECH Screen or Report makes the program more robust. The term /SLASH variable or /SLASH file is really programmer's slang for: global variables. In this case the global variable is preceded by a "/" prefix. Global variables must be a minimum of 3 upper case letters in length: /PRE or /ANS or /R.FRAG.VAL are good examples of properly named slash variables.

== Slash File Limitations ==
1) The slash file as it's known does not have a technical limit. Because there is no limit; you could load enough information into the slash file to crash the entire MEDITECH HCIS. That would occur when you'd managed to use up the entire hard disk space allocated for MEDITECH.
2) MEDITECH Z programs require local variables be used to pass parameters:
- %Z.debug(/ALLERGY) probably won't pass the value in /ALLERGY to the Z program.
- %Z.debug(ALLERGY) will pass the value in ALLERGY as the A parameter to the Z program.

Want an alert when the next post is published? Click the phone and Subscribe to the MEDITECH Reports Blog!