Open Dental Forum

Is a .dll plugin the only way to accomplish this or can you read the folder list from the DB and write files in with a DB insert? I looked at the query list and couldn't find anything related to this.

Thanks in advance!

I remember being pointed to the sheets table, but I don't see reference to folders at all there

You don't have to involve the db at all. Just drop the files in the the patient's folder. The name of their folder is in the db as patient.ImageFolder. The next time the user opens that patient images module, it will automatically recognize the new file(s) and prompt to add to db. You should never do a db insert or update for any reason.

Thanks Jordan. How would we specify which folder in the patient's chart we want the PDF to go in without touching the db? Seems like it just goes to a default folder in the patient's chart and can't be categorized

just drag it to the folder you want or right click and change the category from the properties window

drtech wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 11:27 am just drag it to the folder you want or right click and change the category from the properties window

We're uploading the PDFs programmatically and there's no API for this

Correct. You can't specify the folder. I think it ends up in the first folder. So you could organize the folders with your "in" folder at the top, if that's how it's normally used. I'll think about some sort of special prefix or suffix that could be added to the filename to designate destination folder and maybe import silently.

jordansparks wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 8:17 pm Correct. You can't specify the folder. I think it ends up in the first folder. So you could organize the folders with your "in" folder at the top, if that's how it's normally used. I'll think about some sort of special prefix or suffix that could be added to the filename to designate destination folder and maybe import silently.

That would be great Jordan, otherwise if we are going to be competitive with other vendors that DO upload to the correct folder, we will have to write to the DB, which nobody wants to do

I think we might be able to add that today to the head, and maybe backport to beta if it looks extremely safe.

jordansparks wrote: Fri Nov 20, 2020 8:30 am I think we might be able to add that today to the head, and maybe backport to beta if it looks extremely safe.

Thanks Jordan! and that would work only for offices on the latest version of OD whenever you roll this out i assume

Beta is 20.4. I saw progress on this Friday, but it's not quite done.

It's been posted. Prefix your files with _#_, where # is the DefNum. It will strip off the prefix and then import to the specified category.

Another issue we're facing: not all patients will have a folder designated in the file directory right off the bat. And there's no default naming convention for a folder that maps back to a patient. meaning we would have to go into open dental manually to create a default folder for a patient, and THEN read the db to find out what the physical directory is named, and THEN upload a file there for uptake by OD.

That's a trickier problem. I suppose we could add a pref that creates a folder whenever a patient was created.