ART-DECOR® – Release 3.10.1

Release notes 30 March 2026

Introduction

We are happy to announce ART-DECOR® Release 3.10.1. This maintenance release builds upon Release 3.10.0 and addresses a total of 26 resolved tickets. These consist of new features, improvements, and bug fixes across the platform.

The highlights of this release are:

• Completion of Transaction Building Blocks (TBB) Phase 2 and Phase 3 — including backend concept tree, frontend TBB management, and override support
• A new terminology-admin permission group for finer-grained access control on terminology functions
• Ordinal support in CodeSystems and ValueSet expansions (CADTS)
• Enhanced Implementation Guide pages with hierarchical heading levels and improved layout
• Multiple bug fixes in terminology package management, actor deletion, ZibReporter privacy, and value set CSV exports
• Internal: migration of DECOR-services ProjectIndex from legacy art functions to modern API functions

NOTE

Release 3.10.1 is a cumulative update and fully replaces 3.10.0. Existing installations should upgrade directly to this version.

General Remarks

As announced in the 3.10.0 release notes, this release includes further previews.

Preview: NextGen Publications

Work on the next-generation publication pipeline continues. This release includes merged frontend changes related to the publication panel (AD30-2357) that unify the 'Use IG' option when initiating a publication. End-users will notice a more coherent initiation flow when starting a new publication with an attached Implementation Guide.

Preview: Implementation Guide Processing

The Implementation Guide page editor has received significant enhancements (AD30-2328). Page hierarchy now has a direct impact on heading levels in the rendered output: the multilingual page title is shown as the top-level heading, and child pages inherit descending H-levels.

Additionally, the TipTap Artifact Select dialog has been extended to include Scenarios alongside Datasets, Value Sets, and Templates (AD30-2346 and AD30-2269), enabling richer inline artifact references in IG free-text fields.

Transaction Building Blocks (Phases 2 and 3)

The Transaction Building Blocks (TBB) feature set advances substantially in this release, completing both Phase 2 (concept tree and frontend add/manage flow) and Phase 3 (backend override support). A new dedicated example project (demo15) has been created to demonstrate the full TBB workflow.

Example project (AD30-2198): A new example project (demo15) has been created to showcase Transaction Building Blocks, including Phase 2 override scenarios. The demo project extends the existing demoX series and serves as the acceptance test vehicle for TBB functionality.

Backend concept tree (AD30-2310): The backend now supports getTransaction with a containedTransaction for the first level of the concept hierarchy. Resolved transactions are returned with their full TBB context, enabling the frontend to render nested override chains correctly.

Frontend TBB management (AD30-2314): Users can now add a Transaction Building Block from within Edit mode via the action menu. Selecting a TBB links the source project/transaction into the current transaction. The detail panel provides visibility into linked TBBs.

Backend overrides — Phase 3 (AD30-2340): Override resolution is now fully implemented in the backend. The representingTemplate/concept/containedTransaction mechanism is used to store and resolve overrides, with the override chain made available in the API response.

Implementation Guides

Several improvements have been made to the Implementation Guide authoring and rendering pipeline.

Enhanced IG pages (AD30-2328): The page hierarchy of an Implementation Guide now influences heading levels in the rendered output. The multilingual title of a page is shown as the primary heading; child pages inherit progressively lower heading levels. This improves navigation and readability of complex, multi-level Implementation Guides.

Publication panel — use IG (AD30-2357): The 'Use IG' toggle is now consistently available when initiating a new publication, regardless of other panel state. Conflicts arising from parallel changes to the publication panel have been resolved and merged.

Backend support for Publications (AD30-2307): Following the design of the new IG feature (story and top ticket in AD30-438) and the frontend enhancements (AD30-2305) we enabled the backend to support Implementation Guide Post-processing.

DECOR2html — new a href syntax (AD30-2386): DECOR HTML rendering has been updated to correctly unpack the new internal artifact link syntax (ds::OID/date) that is emitted by the TipTap editor. Elements containing this syntax are now rendered as proper hyperlinks in published output.

Terminology

This release introduces a new terminology-admin permission group, fixes ordinal support in CodeSystem and ValueSet pipelines, and addresses a package manager update detection bug for LOINC packages.

LOINC package update detection (AD30-2133): The package manager was not detecting newer LOINC AD3 packages (and the associated LOINC AnswerValueSets package) in the development repository as updatable. The version comparison logic in the Available tab has been corrected; updates are now detected and offered without requiring a manual deinstall/reinstall cycle.

terminology-admin permission group (AD30-2347 / AD30-2348 / AD30-2349): A new group 'terminology-admin' has been introduced at both the backend (group definition, ART package) and frontend (user panel, translations) levels. Terminology report functions and CodeSystem reports are now gated on this group rather than on the broader 'terminology' group. Existing user group memberships are not affected — users with the old permission retain access and administrators can selectively grant the new group.

CodeSystem ordinals in CADTS (AD30-2360): DECOR CodeSystems that carry ordinal attributes were not persisting ordinal values when written to CADTS. The DECORbrowsableCodeSystemOnly type has been extended to support the ordinal attribute directly, so ordinal information is now preserved end-to-end.

ValueSet expansion ordinal support (AD30-2361): ValueSet expansion calculations now honour ordinal values from source CodeSystems. Both the frontend display for DECOR-based code systems and the backend CADTS storage have been updated consistently with AD30-2360.

ValueSet CSV codeSystemName (AD30-2384): When downloading a ValueSet as CSV, the codeSystemName was taken from the database-stored value rather than the canonical general name from the OID registry. The CSV export now uses the general OID registry name (e.g. 'SNOMED Clinical Terms'), matching the display shown in the frontend.

NOTE

Please be aware that all terminology package updates on your local server may take up to 20 minutes or even more of re-indexing time, depending on your third-party terminologies installed.

FHIR

web-source extension on .meta.source (AD30-2281): FHIR resources exported by ART-DECOR's FHIR servers carry a .meta.source element that identifies the originating project. When such a resource is consumed by the IG Publisher, the absence of a formal 'web-source' extension caused warnings. The FHIR server output now includes the appropriate web-source extension on all .meta.source entries, ensuring clean downstream processing by HL7 tooling.

Datasets

Concept insertion into 'item' concepts (AD30-2203): The API was permitting new child concepts to be inserted under parent concepts of type 'item', which is architecturally invalid — 'item' concepts are leaf nodes. The backend now rejects such requests with an appropriate error, preventing malformed dataset structures from being stored.

Questionnaires

Valueset codes were undefined when rendering a Questionnaire in LHCforms. This has been fixed in the corresponding API parts and service module Questionnaire (AD30-2394).

Project and Administration

Several fixes and improvements address project management, access control, and data integrity.

ZibReporter privacy fix (AD30-2342): The publicly accessible ZibReporter was inadvertently exposing data from projects marked as private. Private projects are now correctly excluded from the ZibReporter output, so only publicly accessible project data is surfaced.

Project extract output size limit (AD30-2343): For large projects, the default eXist-db output-size-limit of 1 M nodes was being exceeded by the project extract script, resulting in truncated output. The limit has been increased to 9 M nodes (XML fragments), ensuring that large project extracts complete without truncation.

Actor deletion by decor-admins (AD30-2354 / AD30-2355): Previously, actors could only be deleted by DBA-level users; decor-admin users were blocked both in the frontend (no button shown) and in the backend API (request rejected). Both layers have been updated to permit actor deletion by users with the decor-admin role, without requiring DBA access.

statusCode 'pending' translation (AD30-2372): The statusCode value 'pending' was not translated in the Value Set Association pane, appearing as the raw technical string rather than its localised label ('under pre-publication preview'). The translation lookup has been added for this context.

Software Development and Internal

ProjectIndex migration (AD30-2364): The DECOR-services ProjectIndex module relied on legacy 'art' library functions. These have been rewritten to use modern API functions, reducing technical debt and aligning this module with the ongoing de-art migration effort. There is no user-visible change in behaviour.

Artifact classes in text fields (AD30-2269): Free-text fields in dataset descriptions and IG pages now support symbolic artifact references for a broader range of artifact types. This builds on the original AD30-880 implementation and makes virtually any registered artifact class selectable through the 'Add Artifact' button in TipTap. As an example, Scenarios are now selectable in the Artifact Select dialog (AD30-2346), the TipTap dialog now includes them.

Hints for Updating an ART-DECOR® Release for local installations

For all our hosted servers we do planned and announced updates of the server software regarding backend and frontend, comprised of ART-DECOR Vue and ART-DECOR http-proxy.

Please Note

When you have a local installation of ART-DECOR and want to update to this release, please consider reading our Updating an ART-DECOR® Release documentation.

Thank you

A BIG thank you!

We are always thankful for any comments and suggestions.

Special thanks for the feedback regarding the Template Viewer and Editor to the colleagues from ELGA (Austria) and HL7 Italy / Ernst&Young (EY) and for Dataset and Questionnaire editor to the Berlin Institute of Health @ Charité team.

Especially in the terminology and questionnaire sector we got great feedback from the Dutch ICT Institute in Health Care (Nictiz). Thanks to Gunter Haroske working for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Pathologie / German Association of Pathology pointing to shortcomings and missing features in our Questionnaire functions and to the Dutch Uitkomstgerichte Zorg Program for contributions in the same area.

Special thanks also to the mio42 GmbH team, Agence du Numérique en Santé (ANS) and our partners at Kereval / IHE Europe for testing, feature suggestions and bug fix requests.

Please don't hesitate to write us with suggestions for improvements or feature requests to our email address provided for this purpose: feedback@art-decor.org, also easily reachable through the Services Card at our ART-DECOR landing page (the link with the bulb 😃).

Outlook

Current development is heading towards further Releases 3.10.2 and 3.10.3 as well as towards 3.11 which focuses on further enhancements and features for Transaction Building Blocks and Questionnaire Management. We plan to have intermediate minor releases to tackle the Transaction Building Blocks features appropriately but stepwise. We are also working hard on our new FHIR Profile Editor utilizing FHIR Shorthand (FSH), here a sneak preview.

At the same time we are currently also working on the ART-DECOR Release 4 series. This will imply a big update on the frontend as we switch to Vue 3, also the backend will make use of the new eXist-db Database Release v6.4.1.

As you can see: more on that to come. Thank you for your patience. Stay tuned.