So far, you have seen how Chameleon can be used to extract user-defined data from HL7 messages. However, in normal applications, you certainly do not want to examine each message individually in Chameleon. In most cases, you will have an application that does the following:

• Accepts incoming HL7 messages from some source;
• Extracts data into custom data structures; and
• Performs some function with the data, such as submitting it to a database and comparing it to other data.

The parsing of the HL7 message and the extraction of the data should be automatic and invisible, since the application only cares about the extracted data.

To make this possible, Chameleon can automatically generate a set of classes that will hold the extracted data and which can be accessed from within your application; this set of classes is called stubcode. Chameleon's built-in Stubcode Generation Wizard can generate these classes in a wide variety of programming languages. Your application only needs to include these classes in order to have access to the HL7 data.

In this section of the tutorial, you will learn how to generate the stubcode for your project.