Writing your own ITypedElement implementation

The components that make up the parsing and serialization stack of the .NET framework are designed to be composed to be provide flexibility for different usecases and make it easy to add additional behaviour. You could build a pipeline converting XML to JSON by starting out with the FhirXmlNode (implementing ISourceNode), calling ToTypedElement() on it (effectively wrapping it in an internal implementation of ITypedElement called TypedElement). This is then again wrapped by the FhirJsonBuilder class, which turns the output into JSON.

This pipeline can be extended by custom implementations of both interfaces, and the SDK already contains a few extra’s out of the box:

• The MaskingNode, which wraps another ITypedElement and which represents a tree pruned to just the nodes marked with isSummary. It could also be extended to mask out data based on the user’s authorization.

• The ScopedNode, which tracks parent/child relationships and keeps track of the nearest “parent resource” (amonst other things) while traversing the tree. This information is used by both the validator and the FhirPath evaluation engine.

The MaskingNode source code is an excellent place to start exploring the possibilities provided by the framework.