opensafely-core / opensafely-core/opencodelists

Enhancement request: Add code type to the codelist builder search

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enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
60
Forks
16
Avg merge
4d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
17

Description

Summary

A user has suggested filtering search results by code type (for example, SNOMED Procedure or Record artifact, ICD-10 Chapter) while building codelists. This may help reduce irrelevant search results and make reviewing search matches easier. See: https://bennettoxford.slack.com/archives/C07AA91BZD4/p1784535255724359

What would you like to achieve?

Problem: When a search returns many results across different code types, users must manually review and deselect large numbers of irrelevant codes before identifying the ones they want.
One user described wanting to focus on a specific category of codes (for example, procedures) rather than reviewing every matching result.

Who would benefit and how?

Codelist builders
Potential benefit: Allowing users to filter search results by code type could:

  • reduce the amount of manual review required
  • make large result sets easier to navigate
  • help users find relevant codes more quickly

Open questions

  • Should filtering affect the recorded search (search terms), or simply the way results are displayed?
  • Is filtering valuable without bulk select/deselect functionality, or would users still face significant manual effort?
  • Are there other metadata fields users would also want to filter by?

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the codelist builder search flow and how search results expose code types such as SNOMED Procedure and ICD-10 Chapter. Clarify whether filtering changes recorded searches or only displayed results, and whether bulk selection is also needed. Done requires an agreed interaction and acceptance criteria for reducing irrelevant results.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
search
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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