Question
· Dec 15

Does IRIS for Health support non standard FHIR Search parameters for pagination?

#FHIR #InterSystems IRIS for Health

Hi,

Does IRIS have any support for paginating FHIR searches other than the standard next/prev links as defined in the FHIR spec?  For instance, some servers support an _offset or _skip parameter to allow for jumping to specific pages in a result set.  

Product version: IRIS 2025.2
Discussion (2)1
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Patrick Jamieson · Dec 15

Short answer: no – the IRIS for Health FHIR server doesn’t expose an _offset / _skip (or similar) parameter for random-access paging. We do support

  • Standard FHIR paging via Bundle.link[next] / Bundle.link[prev]
  • Control over page size and max total results, but not “jump to page N”   If you need “jump to arbitrary position” or more sophisticated pagination in an app, your options are basically:
  • Stick with FHIR paging
    • Use _count to set a page size that’s convenient.
    • Follow next links and optionally prefetch ahead a page or two in your client so the UI feels snappy when users jump forward.
  • Page over SQL instead of FHIR
    • Load/search your data via Resource Repository / FHIR SQL Builder and then query it with SQL, where you do have OFFSET/FETCH or equivalent.
    • Your UI can then use traditional page numbers while the FHIR server is just the ingestion layer.
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