Skip to main content

Getting started for platform developers

Android CI with Gradle codecov License project chat

Build setup

Begin by cloning this repository. Ensure you have JAVA 11 installed, and setup Android studio to use the Java 11 JDK for this project.

Update local.properties file by providing the required Keycloak credentials to enable syncing of data to and from the HAPI FHIR server:

#oauth credentials
OAUTH_BASE_URL=https://keycloak-stage.smartregister.org/auth/realms/FHIR_Android/
OAUTH_CLIENT_ID="provide client id"
OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET="provide client secret"
OAUTH_SCOPE=openid

#fhir store base url
FHIR_BASE_URL=https://fhir.labs.smartregister.org/fhir/

#sentry dsn
SENTRY_DSN=<https://your/sentry/project/dsn>

Gateway vs Non Gateway backend

The codebase supports building a release that uses the FHIR Gateway backend and one that doesn't. The proxy mode is the default but if your backend is not using the FHIR Gateway you need to specify this by switching to the correct build type variant. To switch between the two one needs to change to a variant with the debugNonProxy build type. e.g for the flavor opensrp select the variant opensrpDebugNonProxy

App release

In order for the assembleRelease and/or bundleRelease Gradle tasks to work for instance when you need to generate a signed release version of the APK (or AAB), a keystore is required.

Generate your own release keystore using the keytool utility (installed as part of the java runtime) by running the following command:

keytool -genkey -v -keystore fhircore.keystore.jks -alias <your_alias_name> -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -validity 1000

Place the Keystore file in your user(home) directory i.e. /Users/username/fhircore.keystore.jks for Windows or ~/fhircore.keystore.jks for Unix based systems.

Next, create the following SYSTEM_VARIABLEs and set their values accordingly: KEYSTORE_ALIAS, KEYSTORE_PASSWORD, KEY_PASSWORD

Note: Assign the generated keystore values to the SYSTEM_VARIABLEs listed above. Also note, if your platform doesn't prompt you for a second password when generating the Keystore (e.g. of type PKCS12) then both the KEYSTORE_PASSWORD and KEY_PASSWORD should have the same value.

You can alternatively store the above credentials in a file named keystore.properties. Just be careful to include this file in .gitignore to prevent leaking secrets via git VCS.

KEYSTORE_PASSWORD=xxxxxx
KEYSTORE_ALIAS=xxxxxx
KEY_PASSWORD=xxxxxx

Lastly, you can also provide the local.properties and/or the keystore.properties file as a gradle property using via the property names localPropertiesFile and keystorePropertiesFile respectively. The value of the properties file should be its absolute file path.

For example, to build the eCHIS release from the terminal you can run the command below:

./gradlew assembleEchisRelease --stacktrace -PlocalPropertiesFile=/Abolute/Path/To/echis.local.properties -PkeystorePropertiesFile=/Absolute/Path/To/echis.keystore.properties 

Note: The app supports a variant mode that does not require the FHIR Gateway/Proxy to be integrated. To build the same APK as a NON-PROXY variant set the isNonProxy gradle property to true e.g.

./gradlew assembleEchisRelease --stacktrace -PisNonProxy=true -PlocalPropertiesFile=/Abolute/Path/To/proxy.echis.local.properties -PkeystorePropertiesFile=/Absolute/Path/To/echis.keystore.properties 

Refer to the following links for more details:

Application architecture

FHIR Core is based on MVVM Android application architecture. It also follows the recommended Repository Pattern on its data layer. The diagram below shows the different layers of the application structure and how they interact with eachother.

At the core is Android FHIR SDK which provides Data Access API, Search API, Sync API, Smart Guidelines API and Data Capture API.

Project Structure

The project currently consists an application module (quest) and two Android library modules (engine and geowidget). The geowidget module contains implementation for intergrating Map views to FHIR Core. engine module contains shared code.

Package structure

quest and geowidget modules packages are grouped based on features. engine module on the other hand uses a hybrid approach, combining both layered and feature based package structure.

At a higher level every module is at least organized into three main packages, namely:

data

This package is used to holds classes/objects implementations for accessing data view the Android FHIR SDK APIs. The data package for engine module is further sub-divided into two sub-packages that is local and remote. local directory holds the implementation for accessing the Sqlite database whereasremote directory contains implementation for making http requests to HAPI FHIR server backend.

ui

This package mostly contains Android Activity, Fragment, ViewModel, and Composable functions for rendering UI.

util

This package is used to hold any code that shared internally typically implemented as Kotlin extensions. Other utilities use kotlin object to implement singletons.

Conventionally, classes are further organized into more cohesive directories within the main packages mentioned above. This should allow minimal updates when code is refactored by moving directories.

Resources

Refer to the following links for more details:

Running the documentation locally

To run the documentation locally navigate to the repository root directory and run:

npm install
npx docusaurus start