SOA introduced Grid Editor to Semantics Manager beginning v6.7. The most significant impact is its incompatibility to our implementation of Context Properties. Specifically, when variable MDE assets are concerned, the current configuration requires users to first identify a top-level MDES of which individual properties are to be associated with. In other words, the individual properties are nested under this top-level MDES property. The Grid Editor does not support nested properties. The following screenshot demonstrates how the context properties for CDASH's AEACN are associated to the top-level MDES CDASH^MDES 1.1:

To circumvent this we can adjust the configuration to "flatten" Context Property so that it will no longer appear nested. This approach has impacts to these areas:

  1. Configuration: Will need to remove the "mdes-name-version" property from the property group
  2. Existing assets: For assets that already use the nested properties feature, will need to reload their context properties. This includes all versions of SDTM, plus CDASH and SEND.
  3. Stack exports: Column headers in the export will change to not include the "mdes-name-version" portion
  4. Programs: Both the import file generation and programmatic QC programs will need to adjusted to reflect this configuration change

No impact to asset versioning scheme is expected. Nested context properties exists only for variable MDE assets, which are bound to domain MDES assets that are eventually bound to the top-level MDES asset.

We will be able to benefit these advantages by pursuing this "flattening" approach:

  1. Reap the full benefit of the new Grid Editor so that user can edit all classifiers and properties, not partial
  2. The structure of the exports is notorious to be complex. This will help reduce the complexity.

Other considerations:

  1. Perform configuration changes first in SHARE-Sandbox
  2. Reload at least one impacted foundational standards using the flattened context properties
  3. Perform test to all impacted areas
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