Persist HTTP requests to the fhir validator

[nathanloyer]

As my team was trying to debug some issues with our resources failing, we found that inferno was claiming that fhir validator found the resource to be invalid. However, the details of the resource were not available to us because the requests to the FHIR Validator API service were not persisted.

This is the issue we were trying to debug: #154

Persisting these requests would give us additional detail about which resource was failing. It was very difficult to find the root cause of this issue without this feature.

[arscan]

Thanks for the feature request!

Would providing the ID of the failing resource in the error message give you enough information? If we aren't doing that right now, that is an oversight. This wouldn't help if the resource doesn't provide an id for some reason, but I doubt that is the issue usually.

I do think it would be a good idea to save off resources that fail validation, and provide some way to view it -- maybe not framed as an http request but rather just a stored version of the actual resource.

[Jammjammjamm]

The fact that the validation occurs as an http request is an implementation detail. Those requests themselves aren't behavior that is being tested, so I wouldn't want to display them as requests, but would want to come up with a way to improve our validation messages as Rob mentioned..

[nathanloyer]

Having the full request would be most helpful when debugging issues. We were trying to figure out if the issue was with our resource or with inferno/validator, so just a resource ID wouldn't have been enough to help there.

That said, no we are not getting a resource ID at the moment, and that would be a great first step.

If you don't want to typically show the requests to the validator, could you consider adding a flag we can set on startup to enable persisting the validator http requests? Could be like a debug mode or something.