As an EHR solution evolves, the templates also tend to evolve to an acceptable level, especially since the archetypes themselves are evolving. However, all the data recorded using different versions of the OPT should remain consistently and easily query-able with out the AQL becoming overly complex and difficult to manage.
So is there any best practices in versioning the templates as they evolve so that the incremental evolution does not break the AQLs. The question is do we use the OPT filename(visually identifiable), Name filed in template properties or any of the fields in authorship metadata for indicating the template version?
Secondly, is there any template best practices document?
We have informally started to add major version number to our template names. Our assumption is that major and minor changes to any component, which are not constrained out, should bubble-up to the template. e.g if we switched from blood_pressure.v1 to blood_pressure.v2 that would require a template major change. OTOH if we went from blood_pressure.v1.1 → 1.2 but none of the 1.2 changes impacted the template we would not change the template minor version.
Not sure if that is fully thought through but it follows the spirit of the archetype id scheme, I think.