NCS Navigator Cases (formerly NCS Navigator Core) manages participant activity and records interactions between Study Center personnel and participants. It can be used as a way to administer instruments to a participant for any event in the participant cycle. Also it is used to synchronize data between the NCS Navigator Offline field][] application and the NCS Navigator Core application.
Cases extensively uses Patient Study Calendar PSC to not only determine the participant schedule but also to inform Cases of the structure of the National Children's Study NCS.
The data schema is based on the Master Data Element Specification (MDES) of the National Children Study, versions 2.0-2.2.
It is a Ruby on Rails application which uses Rails 3 and a PostgreSQL database.
On the deployment workstation:
On the application server:
Cases uses bcdatabase to discover the database
configuration to use. Bcdatabase looks for a YAML file with a
particular structure under /etc/nubic/db.
- For a staging deployment, the file name should be
/etc/nubic/db/ncsdb_staging.yml - For production, it should be
/etc/nubic/db/ncsdb_prod.yml
Example:
defaults:
adapter: postgresql
host: ncsdb-staging
port: 5432
ncs_navigator_core:
database: ncs_navigator_core_staging # database name
username: ncs_navigator_core
password: ncs_navigator_core
Cases uses Aker-Rails and Aker for authentication.
First, create a file under /etc/nubic/ncs for the the central
authentication parameters. These parameters will be used for all NCS
Navigator applications on the same server.
- In staging, the file name should be
aker-staging.yml - In production, the file name should be
aker-prod.yml
Contents:
cas:
base_url: https://cas.myinst.edu/
Second, define a bootstrap user in
/etc/nubic/ncs/navigator.ini. (See [NCS Staff Portal][] setup.)
Finally, Cases (and most of the applications in the NCS Navigator suite) use the ncs_navigator_authority gem for authentication, which requires a running instance of NCS Staff Portal ncs_staff_portal setup with Staff having particular roles.
Cases uses ncs_navigator_configuration for shared
configuration of the NCS Navigator suite applications. Most
configuration properties are documented in its sample
configuration. Cases looks for the
configuration in its default location, /etc/nubic/ncs/navigator.ini.
To further customize Cases for your center, add one or more of
the following configuration elements to the [Core] section of
the configuration file.
# Configuration options which are used by or which describe NCS
# Navigator Cases in this instance of the suite.
# The root URI for NCS Navigator Cases.
uri = "https://ncsnavigator.ncsstudycenter.org/"
# The Name and Phone number of the Study Center
study_center_name = "NCS Study Center"
study_center_phone_number = "123-555-1234"
toll_free_number = "800-555-1234"
# Whether or not the Study Center collects specimens and samples
with_specimens = "true"
# The identifier of the specimen/sample shipper
shipper_id = "shipper_id"
# The email addresses used in the application
mail_from = "ncs_navigator@greaterchicagoncs.org"
email_exception_recipients = "dev@greaterchicagoncs.org pm@greaterchicagoncs.org"
Cases is deployed with capistrano from a workstation. On
the workstation, you need to create a configuration file
/etc/nubic/db/ncs_deploy.yml to describe where it should be
deployed to.
Example:
ncs_navigator_core:
# Repository for cases. This will always be this value
# unless you wish to deploy your own fork.
repo: "git://github.com/NUBIC/ncs_navigator_core.git"
# path on the server where application will be deployed
deploy_to: "/www/apps/ncs_navigator_core"
# staging server hostname
staging_app_server: "staging.server"
# production server hostname
production_app_server: "production.server"
After you check out the code, run bundle install to install the gems
you'll need. The first time you deploy, capistrano needs to set up the
directory layout it expects:
$ bundle exec cap production deploy:setup
Then deploy to the configured server:
$ bundle exec cap production deploy:migrations
(This deploys to your production server; to deploy to staging instead, substitute "staging" for "production".)
After the first deployment, you should only need to run
deploy:migrations to get new versions. You can also use
deploy:pending to see what would be deployed.
If you have problems deploying, you can run this:
$ bundle exec cap production deploy:check
and capistrano will try to tell you why it cannot deploy.
if you make changes to the footer logo paths in navigator.ini in between deploys, you have to run rake task to copy images
$ bundle exec cap production config:images
As currently configured, Cases will be deployed as the user you use to connect to the application server. The target directory must be writable by that user, and (by way of Passenger) the software will be executed with that users' permissions.
Most likely, the use account you use to connect to the application
server will be your personal account. We may add specific
support for deploying using a different account from the login
account, but an option for now is to use an alias defined in
.ssh/config on the workstation. See issue 1622 for a more
detailed discussion of this option.
Cases relies on many lists of data as determined by the MDES (see Code lists below). It ships with rake tasks which will populate these lists from outside sources.
All the tasks should be executed from the application root on the server where the application is deployed. Each one will need to be run at least once for each environment in which Cases is deployed.
RAILS_ENV needs to be set to the appropriate value (production, staging) when running
the various setup rake tasks for production or staging environment.
e.g bundle exec rake db:seed RAILS_ENV=production
Initialize the code lists from the MDES using ncs_mdes:
$ bundle exec rake db:seed
Cases uses surveyor to create the instruments used by the NCS. These surveys are proprietary and not currently available to the public. They are packaged as a separate ncs-instruments gem. Follow the instructions there to copy the instruments into a directory named surveys at the root of the deployed application.
Once the instruments are in the surveys directory, Cases is shipped with a rake task that will parse the survey syntax and load the surveys into the database.
$ bundle exec rake setup:surveys