Simulator Manager

A simulator is a lightweight implementation of an IHE Actor intended to support testing. The simulators that can be created in this tool all represent servers, they begin operation when a transaction is received. There are client simulators but they are not managed through this tool.

There are two parts to a simulator ID, the testSession and the raw ID. The testSession, which could have been called user, is created/chosen at the top of the tool window. Different testSessions (users) are useful to help keep my simulators from being confused with your simulators. There is not authentication involved, just labeling. A simulator ID is made up of the testSession and the raw ID. The raw ID is entered in the tool and is called Simulator ID in the window. For a testSession of bill and id of reg the resulting simulator id is

bill__reg

which you will see after creating the simulator. You will notice that the simulator id does not indicate the type of simulator. I chose the raw id of reg for my convenience not because it is a shorthand for registry.

Creating a Simulator

  1. Select an Environment. For now this is only used by actors that are sensitive to the Affinity Domain coding policies, which is only the Document Registry actor.
  2. Select a TestSession name. This will be part of the Simulator ID
  3. Select an Actor Type
  4. Enter a Simulator ID.
  5. Press Create Actor Simulator

The simulator configuration will be shown in the table below. Note that not all columns apply to all simulator types. The content statistics (such as number of DocumentEntries - which only applies to Registry) are only update when you press the [reload] button at the top of the tool window.

Transaction Log - displays the transaction log for the actor if it has one

Patient ID Feed - displays the Patient IDs that have been received by the actor (Registry actor only).

Configure - display/edit the simulator configuration

Delete - delete the simulator including logs and configurations

Download Site File - a site file is an XML encoding of the transaction endpoints and OIDs associated with the simulator. This format has been used with toolkit for a very long time. It can be used to import the configuration into your tooling.

Lifetime of a Simulator

Simulators do not expire. As long as the supporting data is present the simulator exists. You can view the simulators you have by selecting a test session in this window. All simulators owned by this test session will be displayed.

Stopping/starting the toolkit does not affect simulators. If toolkit is running so are all of its simulators.

Registry simulator and the Patient Identity Feed

The Document Registry simulator now includes a V2 Patient Identity Feed listener. A new toolkit property managed in Toolkit Configuration, named Listener Port Range, tells toolkit what range of ports it can manage. The format of this field is first_port, last_port.

When a Document Registry simulator is created a port is allocated from this range for the V2 Patient Identity Feed listener. The Registry simulator now validates Patient IDs received in Register transactions against this feed. This validation step can be disabled by updating the simulator configuration in the Simulator Manager tool.

Document Recipient simulator

The Document Recipient simulator is a combination of the Registry and Repository simulators. By default validation against the Patient Identity Feed is disabled. Validation against the Affinity Domain configuration is also disabled by default. These can be changed by updating the simulator configuration in the Simulator Manager tool.