Quality Control

Quality Control checks your project against a set of rules that catch the mistakes a plain validation run does not: missing metadata, inconsistent canonicals, naming and documentation conventions, unused elements, and so on. It is available in Firely Terminal from v2.1 with the fhir check command.

Note

Quality Control is a licensed feature, included in the Simplifier.net Professional plan and higher. Log in with an account that has such a license before running the checks:

> fhir login email=<your email> password=<your password>
> fhir license      #shows which licensed features are available to you

The free rule series is the exception: it runs without a license, but it does not validate your resources.

Running the checks

Run fhir check from your project folder. Without arguments it runs the minimal rule set; add a rule series name to run a different one:

> fhir check                    #runs the minimal rule set
> fhir check recommended        #runs the recommended rule set
> fhir check --list --details   #list the rules in the set without executing them
> fhir check --push             #put the resulting issues on the stack as an OperationOutcome

Firely Terminal ships with three rule series:

Series	Validates?	What it does
free	No	Parsing, id existence, version settings, canonical pinning. Needs no license.
minimal	Yes	The default. Adds validation of all resources against the FHIR standard and their profiles.
recommended	Yes	minimal plus snapshot, id, naming and uniqueness rules. What Firely advises for an IG.

Exit codes

fhir check exits 0 even when it reports errors — it prints FAIL: with the issue counts and still returns success. A non-zero exit code means the check could not run at all: no license, an unknown series, or not a project folder. Use --fail when you want error-level findings to return a non-zero exit code, for example to gate a pipeline:

> fhir check recommended --fail

Custom rule sets

You can write your own rules. A rule set lives in a file named <series>.rules.yaml, for example mychecks.rules.yaml, and you run it by passing the series name: fhir check mychecks.

Note that a series is a name, not a path: Firely Terminal looks for <series>.rules.yaml in your project folder.

Further reading

For the full list of rules, their meaning, and how to author your own rule sets, see the Quality Control documentation on the Simplifier.net documentation site, including the minimal ruleset.

To run these checks on every push or pull request and fail the build on errors, see Automating quality control.