Hey
swapnils,
I had to do a bit of reading because id never heard of HL7 messages before, but after a bit of reading and then i saw an example and realised despite not knowing what an HL7 message was, i actually had a project on a contract for the british NHS about 3 years ago which passed these | delimited flat file HL7 messages (although the documentation didnt call them HL7) from one existing legacy system which was then transformed to json to be consumed by MS Dynamics CRM and then back again to the legacy system (that generates and consumes the HL7 messages).
The way i set this up in ReadyAPI! was to create csv's (1 for each test case) using Excel, which i then after creation opened the csv's in notepad++ and replaced each comma with a vertical bar delimiter then resaved the file as .dat.
I used the directory type datasource to provide the files for my payloads to my REST requests.
I need to highlight that the messaging used message queues so was asynchronous so in regards to validation we used a novel approach for the validation of my .dat files as the live system didnt provide responses to enable assertions.
We got the developers to create additional apis that hooked into the existing apis that provided responses after submitting either valid or invalid HL7 messages. I can explain further if you provide the technical architecture for your project. I.e. message flow (generation and consumption), how are the HL7 messages being consumed? Any transformation? Etc.?
Anyway. The short answer was that due to the lack of validators (like .json or .xml schema) and the asynchronicity, we needed the developers to create additional apis that provided responses against which we could assert against.
Hope this helps,
Rich
