Are we allowed to not support RESTful search based on Resource.id and also not support read interaction for a resource?

1

We are building a middleware system that

  1. delivers user requests to the corresponding source systems
  2. upon receiving responses, it consolidates the data and maps to FHIR resource.
  3. returns the FHIR resources as response (in a Bundle) to the caller.

During the process, we are not allowed to store any data due to legislation rules. For certain source systems, it returns the full list of resources and does not provide capability to search an individual resource. To provide FHIR search for an individual resource is doable however it’s not efficient as in the background, we still need to call the full list resource transaction to the source system and then discard some of the resources that are not needed.

2

If you don’t have a reliable id, you can’t really use RESTful search. The whole point of a RESTful interface is that each resource has a reliable endpoint. That said, a RESTful interface is certainly superior if you can find a way to generate a reliable id. In the absence of one, you’ll need to use an Operation and return ids of the form urn:uuid:[random guid]

3

Thanks Lloyd.
We would likely need to explore the use of Operation over RESTful search.