When editing an INSTRUCTION archetype, setting the action_archetype_id attribute of an ACTIVITY, the AE only gives the possibility of selecting one archetype, but this should support more than one archetype using regexes as said on the specs (ehr_im.pdf setion 8.3.7).
A solution could be to support the selection of more than one action archetype (using the […] button, see screen capture here: https://plus.google.com/109540968085207927247/posts/f33Hs2rHoto) and creating a regex from the selected archetypes like archid1|archid2|archid3
This seems sensible but, to be honest, I have never used this constraint feature in any real-world applications. My experience has been to leave most of these options open as it can be very difficult to predict appropriate future matching archetypes.
I agree for general use archetypes, like the ones published on the CKM, this may constraint more that is needed. But for us that build systems things like these help us building spec-compliant archetypes to test our systems. With this functionality in particular I need to test an UI that can show a form for each action_archetype_id on the activity to record the correspondent action. I know I can edit the ADL by hand, but that’s a practice I try to avoid since it’s error prone.
This AE constraint (and others, e.g. couldn’t create COMPOSITION archetypes without slots i.e. the complete structure defined on the same archetype, or the imposibility of add constraints to ISM_TRANSITION.transition) makes testing a little difficult for us (of course these are drops in a sea of things to test on an openEHR system).
Just thinking out loud, if such functionalities could be enabled in the AE, but you’re affraid that clinical modelers start to use the AE in a wrong way, maybe a “developers” version of the AE could help here. What do you think?