(feature) Global entity search module

[sfount]

This feature request was submitted to the BHIMA support@bhi.ma thread.

Feature request for generic search module that will search all financial entities in BHIMA.
Entities that could be searched:

• Invoices
• Cash payments
• Patients
• Vouchers
• Purchase orders
• Inventory

References to documents should be directly included.

The complexity will be determining what causes an entity to be chosen by the search. For example if a cash payment was paid towards an invoice TFA.12 should it be surfaced when the invoice is searched for - the valid fields that could be searched would have to be clearly defined.

An alternative/ complimenting feature would be to refactor our link structure between tables and entities to be able to search for or directly bring up an entity based on a reference to another.

This work is very closely related to the work on registries found #1742, #1744, #1768, #1749, #1746, #1748

Original Proposal

I am requesting a new basic menu function
This tab "Search" would be under the "Reports" tab.
The the "Search" tab would open up page (possibly a pop up like the current search function but not preferable.
The only option on the first page would be "Search"
Any text or numbers could be input into this search.
Submit button would move to the next page
The next page would display a web page with the items found with that result.
For example:
Search all three Registries
Invoice Registry
Cash Payment Registry
Patients Registry

Example
Search for :
Accouchement
The results would show all items in the three Registries with the text Accouchement.
Limit display to top 10 in each registry.
Results would have hyperlinks similar to the current function of the search
Refine search by date range or by Registry type or by service or by amount range.
Each search would be able to be downloaded as a cvs file to be managed and adjusted in excel.
Example 2
Search text: TF6.13
Results would display all items in Invoice Registry, Cash Payment Registry
and Patients Registry that have TF6.13.
Thus we could find all the cases of TF6.13 as well as all the payments and invoices against this TF6.13.

a. (Priority) High - adding this function would simplify finding items across BHIMA and reduce the different types of specific reports the the programmers have to create in BHIMA

[jniles]

So ... this is a good idea, but I worry that it will have a massive, negative performance impact if used frequently on low-end devices. For that reason, I would try to hide this feature from regular users and make it available to "super users". I can see the potential for every query ever needed to be made using this interface if exposed to the general user.