All, I'm interested in the ability to retrieve a specific element within a FHIR resource using a single URL call. For example, suppose I'm interested in the gender of my patients. I would read the using the URL, without having to walk the XML node path every time. Right now, this functionality does not appear to exist. What do you think about the usefulness of this? Would like to get a sense of the community interest. Thanks.
-Jeff
For the default query mechanism, you can't bring anything back other than the full resource. (And don't even have a guarantee that the desired element will be present on all instances of the resource unless that element was part of your search criteria - in which case, why bother asking? :>). There's a new mechanism for defining custom queries. Refer to _query in the search/query section of the FHIR spec. However, it's not clear whether this will allow retrieval of anything other than full resource instances either.
This functionality does not exist at this time. It's on the wishlist, and we're trying to decide whether we can frame it in a sensible and safe fashion. The case you describe is relatively obvious, but many others aren't. And, in fact, when I think about it, it's not really clear to me how it works. what do you get back? just the gender element? so the server needs to - in effect - do the node walk for you, and you get, instead, to deal with a profusion of different schemas. It's not really obvious to me that this is a net saving for the client, and it's certainly a greater cost for the server.
