The first step in creating this application is to open Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and create a form for your application. The figure below shows how this form could look:

A Sample Form For Parsing and Generating HL7 Messages

This form contains four components:

• A text box into which you type or copy an HL7 message to be parsed;
• Text boxes into which you type next of kin information for a patient;
• A button to start the generating process;
• A text box that will contain the output, which is the HL7 message with NK1 (Next Of Kin) segments added.

In this tutorial, these components have the following names:

• The text box for the input HL7 message is named HL7InputField;
• The text boxes for the first next of kin are named Surname1Field, FirstName1Field and Relationship1Field;
• The text boxes for the second next of kin are named Surname2Field, FirstName2Field and Relationship2Field;
• The button is named GenerateMessageButton;
• The text box that will contain the generated HL7 message is named HL7OutputField.

	An HL7 message can contain multiple NK1 segments, which is why this form allows the user to supply more than one next of kin.

Once you have your form, the next step is to use Chameleon to create a VMD file that defines the types of messages that you want to generate and the fields that these messages will contain.