Special Characters in VGR

[Scott Morris FMC]

Does anyone have a comprehensive list of the characters that don't work with VGR?  I know that if someone places a percent sign (%) in a text field and it gets mapped via VGR, it stops the order string without throwing any kind of error.  This can be particularly dangerous if you concatenate a number of orders after the %, the user thinks that they've ordered something, but it never gets placed.

[Scott Morris FMC]

By the way, we tested the percent sign specifically and it seems to work just fine if the iForm is a "Standard iForm" but not when it's mapped via VGR.

[Mark Socks]

Oh my gosh, thank you! I have had 3 or 4 cases in the past few months where orders suddenly stopped after the first few orders. I bet that this is what happened.

Strangely, it works fine if you have the VGR add a % into the order string. It must have something to do with reading the field.

I have also run into issues with ` (unsurprisingly). On one version of HEO, various characters broke the playback, including the bar "|"

[Scott Morris FMC]

Ok, so our running list is currently %, `, and |.  Has anyone else run across any others?

I suppose we could just do some unit testing and find out, but I was hoping that someone had already run through those motions.

[Russ Garlow]

I've had problems with < and > but I haven't had a chance to really test the conditions in which that causes a problem.

[Scott Morris FMC]

From the [heo_group] Yahoo! Group, I got a reply from Tom Wessel:

From: ***@***.com On Behalf Of Tom Wessel

Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2012 4:33 PM

To: ***@***.com

Subject: RE: [heo_group] Special Characters in VGR

  

I believe that these are the reserved characters for HEO that a user needs to avoid:

 

%  +  @  \  `  ~  or  &

 

However, you can capture these as values (e.g. frequency = "AM+PM") by substituting the hexadecimal code for the character.  For example, you would represent AM+PM as "AM%2BPM" where %2B is the hexadecimal code for the .  This workaround works for VGR iForms.  I can't speak for standard iForms.

__________________________________

Tom Wessel, MD

CMIO

Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System

Spartanburg, SC

From my testing of these particular characters:

• % cuts off the rest of the string with no error
• + seems to just remove the plus but keep text on either side 
  
• @ seems to work
• \ seems to work
• ` throws an error, with or without a word directly after it. I'd assume that you could conceivably type `myVariableName and have the VGR parser interpret it
• ~ seems to add a line break; I haven't tested to see whether it gets sent with line breaks to the other systems
• & seems to cut off the rest of the string, much like %

I also did test his suggestion to use the URL codes and those do seem to work, even though they include the % sign.

URL Encoding Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

[Russ Garlow]

I tried using &#37 ; for the percent sign in my VGR and it shows up right on the iForm and in HEO, but when it crosses to Care Organizer it shows literal.

[Scott Morris FMC]

Try using %25 instead of &#37 and let me know if that works.

[Russ Garlow]

Shows up literal in HEO and Care Oganizer. Doesn't stop the order like a lone % does though.