Chameleon can be many different things just as its name suggests. For Chameleon users, it is a parsing/generation engine for HL7 messages that provides a code-level interface between your application and HL7 messages.

Moreover, Chameleon has the ability to do the following:

• Parse incoming messages to a stable internal data structure defined according to your application's business logic;
• Generate outgoing messages from your application's data objects; and
• Transform an incoming message into an altered outgoing message.

Chameleon From a SDK-User Perspective

	For Iguana users, Chameleon's definition becomes quite different. Chameleon is strictly used to create and edit visual message definition (VMD) files. The VMD file is then used in Iguana to perform various functions such as mapping data from your database tables to an HL7 message and converting HL7 messages to XML.