Getting started - Authentication

Let's get started by hooking up to an openEHR CDR via the openEHR REST API.

This API is now supported by most publicly avaaible CDRs, including Better, DIPS, Code24 and Ehrbase

We have included examples for the Better CDR used by the Apperta Code4Health platform band they have also been tested against the ehrBase CDR

Authentication

All of the openEHR CDR API calls require some sort of authentication in the header.

In production this is likely to be something like JSON Web Tokens (JWT) but for demo purposes both ehrBase and betterCDR support Basic Auth based on a Username and Password.

Basic Authentication

If you have a Postman enviromment file related to your CDR, you should be able to find the Username and Password, and possibly the Basic Auth token, pre-calculated.

If it is not pre-calculated, it is easy to do so with code like this Typescript.

 const authString = btoa(`${username}:${password}`)
 const authToken = `Basic: ${authString}`

You then need to send that token in the Authorization header of your REST call e.g.

curl --location --request GET 'https://cdr.code4health.org/rest/v1/template' \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: '

Connecting to the CDR

To test our basic connection to the CDR, we will perform a very simple List templates call to list the openEHR templates currently registered with the CDR -> Working with openEHR Templates