Post authored by Willy Tekeu, one of Medic’s Software Engineers.
Medic is excited to announce the release of the next version of the Community Health Application Framework: 3.6.0. This release adds an integration with the Africa’s Talking SMS aggregator, a backward compatible enhancement to the processing of mRDT metadata, one performance improvement, and other improvements and several bug fixes.
Africa’s Talking integration
Version 3.6.0 includes an integration with the Africa’s Talking SMS aggregator. This allows us to offer a cloud based alternative to managing your own medic-gateway devices. We have created a new routine and a new set of API endpoints to send SMS via Africa’s Talking, process callbacks from Africa’s Talking, and update the status of outgoing messages. Please note that this integration is disabled by default. For more information read the configuration documentation.
mRDT timestamp metadata
Version 3.6.0 includes a backward-compatible enhancement to the processing of mRDT metadata. Version 0.1.5 of the rdt-capture app includes a timestamp representing how long it takes the community health worker to capture the RDT. This piece of information is passed to the android wrapper medic-android which, since v0.4.30, passes it to the webapp. Once the mRDT form is submitted, this new field timeTaken will be stored in the resulting document.
Performance
When we released 3.5.0 we noted the existence of a performance regression when loading the list of Contacts. This issue has been resolved in 3.6.0.
And much more…
This release includes 2 new features, 9 improvements to existing features, 3 performance improvements and 10 bug fixes. For a complete list of changes and upgrading instructions, check out the release notes.
We hope you’re as excited about version 3.6.0 as we are, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback.
Looking ahead
We’re already hard at work on the next versions with features in the pipeline including server-side purge, xforms generation on the server-side, and gateway improvements. To stay up to date and follow along on our progress, keep an eye on the product roadmap.