Linking Facilities and Departments

In iHRIS Manage, the module ihris-manage-PersonPosition defines the position form which contains the field department and the required field facilty which are both independent lists. In this tutorial, we will discuss how customize iHRIS Manage so that, when editing a position, the departments displayed are dependent on the facility chosen.

This tutorial applies to iHRIS Manage 4.0, although the concepts involved can be applied to iHRIS Qualify as well. Please refer to these articles:

• Defining Forms
• Forms and Form Classes

for background information on forms. You can see these changes in the Zanzibar-position module.

Overview

Our goal is to have the departments for a position to depend on the facility chosen for the position. There are two ways that one could do this.

Option A

To the department form, we could add a required field facility which links to the facility form. In this, way we would now have every department associated to a facility.

There are a few issues with this option:

• Suppose you have to hospitals, Central Hospital and Coastal Hospital. Each would presumably have a department such as Emergency. In this option, you would have to create an Emergency Department for each of the Hospitals. It would then make it difficult to run a report such as "list all employees in all facilities which work in the emergency department" because it really is "list all employees in all facilities which work in a department with the name Emergency." In particular, since we are entering "Emergency" multiple times, there is an increased potential for a spelling mistake which would affect data quality.
• At least for the moment, there is no built in way to first select a facility and then select a department within a form.

Due to these weaknesses, we will not implement Option A in this tutorial.

Option B

We could create a new list form facility_department which contains two required fields, facility and department which map the for lists of the same name. Then in the position form, we no longer link to the list facility or department but to the list facility_department. This has the following advantages over Option A:

• We only have to enter the department Emergency once as we can associate it to many facilities via the facility_department form
• As facility_department is a tiered list (first select a facility, and the select a department) we can use in the built in display methods when selecting the department in the position.

We will implement option B in this tutorial.