Reference - general discussion

[niquola]

Almost everybody agrees that refs should be pre-parsed into some kind of id/resourceType for easier joins. The question is in detail:

• Use id or reference.id or something else - #10
• Use type or resourceType - #11
• How to deal with external references by url - #12
• How to deal with refs by identifiers - #13
• How to provide context-free backward transformation
• How to deal with ids from multiple sources - hashing trick by @gotdan

Starting proposal is

resourceType: Encounter
patient:
  reference 'Patient/pt-1'

resourceType: Encounter
patient:
  reference: .....
  type: Patient
  id: pt-1

[niquola]

patient:
     @id: 'pt1'
     type: 'Patient'

[niquola]

If we use type and id we clash with id, but json is still valid FHIR and this is a good property! Can we estimate how often id is used in references?