Community Bonding at OpenMRS

I am writing this blog to share my community bonding phase with OpenMRS. It was scheduled from 5th May to 31st May. I got to learn a lot from the community before as well as during this period. The project I’ll be working on is Android Client 2.9x.

The topics I would like to cover in this article are:

1. A short introduction to my project
2. Experience and progress during the community bonding period
3. Link to my talk thread for project descriptions
4. Links of your tickets to work on the coding period
5. Links to other resources(Wiki Page / GitHub repository / etc)
6. Project status

A short Introduction to my Project:

The goal of the Android client is to provide an alternative to access a hospital’s OpenMRS instance by just using the provider’s Android devices. Considering the services offered by a hospital, an Android application can help doctors, patients, and other staff a lot with its mobility and ease of use, without them having to start the OpenMRS web app on a desktop computer. This improves the productivity and efficiency of the hospital workflow.

Community Bonding Period:

Since I’ve been associated with this community since December, I already had enough knowledge of my project, it's working, and what all features it provided and what needed to be implemented. I was already part of 2 releases of Android Client and had a contribution of around 30+ PR’s.

My project is going well and we are making progress. I discussed my plans with my mentors and we decided that we should do some basic work in the community bonding period itself and start finding bugs and resolve them for all API levels. I worked on the following tasks during this period:

1. Read API documentations to implement the Admissions form in android Client.
2. Wrote unit tests for Data Access Objects in Room Migrations
3. Fixed few bugs which caused RunTimeExceptions
4. Created PR’s for improving the UI of the app (link to the new screens are given below)
5. Created an option for Unknown Patients
6. Updated readme files for Android Client User Guide

Important Links:

1. Talk thread: Proceeding With GSoC
2. Issues I will be working on are detailed at Google Sheets
3. Android Client Wiki page
4. Android Client Github
5. Android Client User Guide Github
6. New UI Designs on Figma

Project Status

We are already ahead by 1 week and started off with a few of the tasks from week 2. We are having a few blockers while creating Admission forms which we will be working out.

Now that the more exciting and challenging part has begun, I can’t wait to get started bringing this project to the level that I’ve planned.

This week onwards, I will be posting regular weekly blog posts on the updates on further progress on this project here. Thanks for reading! :D