Additional Resources

Learn About Mirth^® Connect Channel Tags and Groups

This Mirth^® Connect training tutorial will be exploring Channel Tags and Channel Groups. These are two very simple, but powerful tools in Mirth^® Connect for keeping your channels organized.

What are Mirth^® Connect Channel Tags?  

Channel tags are searchable keywords you add on a Channel’s summary tab. You can then use these tags to filter channels in either the channels view or on the dashboard

• Allow for better organization and documentation
• Make it easier to manage an instance with many channels
• Make it easier for new developers or consultants to find what they are looking for

For very small implementations of Mirth^® Connect this may seem unnecessary. You can stay organized with some simple naming conventions.

However, if you are running a medium to large size installation of Mirth^® Connect, it quickly becomes burdensome to have to scroll through potentially hundreds of channels to find the one you are looking for.

What are Mirth^® Connect Channel Groups?

Mirth^® Connect Channel groups add an entirely new level to channel management. Organizing channels under distinct groups allows you to more quickly find the channels you’re looking for. You can also perform certain operations across an entire group at once!

• Ability to export a group of channels as a single file
• Perform bulk actions to apply to an entire group – enable/disable, deploy/undeploy, start/stop

These two tools become especially powerful when combined together.

You can use Channel groups in conjunction with channel tags to further sophisticate your channel organization.

Something to note:

• Each channel can only belong to one group
• Tags can apply to many channels in different groups.

Mirth^® Connect Tools Used for Demonstration

For the purposes of today’s demonstration, we will be using the following:

• Mirth^® Connect (3.4.2) – Channel Tags in 3.0 and Channel Groups in 3.4

At the time of this recording, v3.4.3 was the most current release. V3.5 is scheduled to have some improvements to both channel tags and groups. We will be touching on those updates in a later video.

Demonstration of Mirth^® Connect Channels and Tags

Now let’s take a look at demo using both channel groups and tags. We’ll start off on the dashboard. This is what channels look like without groups or tags enabled. This is what you would normally see in Mirth^® Connect, a list of channels sorted by whatever column you choose. Again, simple enough if you are only dealing with a handful of channels like we have here, but if this list included dozens or hundreds of channels, it would be much more difficult to identify which channel you were looking for. Let’s take a look at what your dashboard would look like with Groups enabled. Later, we’ll look at how to set them up.

To enable groups, simply click this little icon on the bottom right, next to the statistics radio buttons. You will see now that our channels are divided into 3 distinct groups:

• East
• West
• Default

The Default group is any channel you have yet to assign to a group. For our example we used a very simple group structure, separating the channels geographically into East and West. The types of groups you decide to use will be dependent on the variety of interfaces you work with. Perhaps you would categorize them by facility, region, vendor, etc. Whatever makes the most sense for you.

Functionally speaking, groups also allow you to take bulk actions on all channels in that group. So for instance, if I need to stop, pause, or undeploy that entire group of channels, I can do it all in on click. For example, let’s go ahead and pause the “East” group. You’ll see that now all 3 of these channels have paused. And just as easily, we can now start all 3 channels at once.

From the channels view, you will have similar types of group functions, such us redeploying or disabling all channels in a group

From the channels view you also have the ability to quickly move a channel from one group to another via drag-and-drop. Simply select the channel you wish to move, and drag it over the name of the group you would like to move it to.

Now that we have seen how groups work, let’s take a look at how to set one up. From the channels view, simply click the New Group button from the group tasks menu. Give your group a name, and a brief description so others know why you have grouped these channels together. Then click OK. We now have a new group to use and you can begin dropping channels into it.

Now let’s take a look at channel tags. Channel tags act as keywords we can use to filter our channels with. Let’s take a look at an example.

Here we have an ADT channel coming from Dr. Stevens. To add a tag, simply come down to the channel tags section on the summary tab, and click add. For this channel, we have added tags for ADT (in case we need to filter certain types of interface, practice (to identify the type of client), and California, to further identify the channel within a region.

When adding tags, you will have a dropdown to existing tags on the system to speed up the process as well as help keep standard nomenclature.

Now that we have some channel tags applied, let’s take a look at how we can use them. To enable a channel tag filter, simply click on the little wrench icon on the bottom left side of the screen. By default, no filters are enabled.

By checking the Enable channel filter box, all tags are selected. In this case, every channel I have that contains a tag will be shown. HOWEVER, it is important to note that if you have any channels that do not have tags assigned, they will be filtered out of this view once you enable the filter.

Let’s go ahead and apply these filters. As you see, two of my channels have now been filtered out as they do not have tags assigned to them. You can see the number of filtered channels next to the little wrench icon.

So, let’s do a simple filter example. Let’s say I am only interested in channels that handle ADT interfaces. I can hit the invert selection button to uncheck all the selected channels, and now only select my ADT tag. As you see, we are now presented with subset of channels to look at.

Selecting multiple tags creates an “OR” style filter. For example, if I select both ADT and California, I know see my lab interfaces AND my California interfaces. To further drill down our organization, we will need to combine the power of groups and tags.

Let’s go ahead and re-enable our groups from earlier. Now with the power of groups and tags I can easily identify which ADT interface is also in the West, narrowing my search. To be even more granular, we could expand our groups to cover states rather than regions, and make this even easier. Again, just depends on what your particular workflow is.

Besides the additional simplicity that this adds for someone who always lives in this system, it also provides a much easier entry point for a new-hire or outsourced resource who is viewing the system for the first time. They can much more easily find the channels they are looking for without having to dig into the details of each one.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. You’ll find some useful links down in the description if you need some additional information.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them down below in the comments section, or you can always head over to our website at consultzen.com

Helpful Mirth^® Connect Links

• Introduction to channel groups
• Download Mirth^® Connect
• Mirth Connect User Guide