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 HL7 Messages

This form contains three components:

• A text box into which you type or copy an HL7 message to be parsed;
• A button to start the parsing process;
• A text box that will contain the parsed output.

In this sample application, these components are named HL7Message, ChangeButton and ParsedOutput, respectively.

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 parse and the fields that you want to extract from these messages.