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Platform news

  1. Controlling which of your project’s actions run in the Github tests

    When you push code to an OpenSAFELY project on Github it will automatically run your full project pipeline to check that it completes successfully. However, for larger projects this can take a long time to complete and sufficiently large projects will never complete due to Github’s six hour time limit. To work…

  2. New version of the OpenSAFELY R image

    We are pleased to announce the availability of a new version of the R image, which we call r:v2. This includes R 4.4.3, and an updated suite of libraries. This has been in a beta testing period for a while, but is now generally available. Upgrading To upgrade, you should just…

  3. Improvements to ehrQL measures performance

    ehrQL’s measures framework is used to calculate quotients (i.e. a numerator divided by a denominator) and to see how these vary over time and when broken down by different groupings. We’ve recently improved the efficiency of measures calculations. All measures jobs are expected to see some improvement in execution time…

  4. Lots of improvements to Airlock

    We’ve recently spent some time improving Airlock, based on feedback from users after a few months of active use. You can see the full list of changes we’ve made (over 80 pull requests!) here. Some highlights, in no particular order:

  5. New way to run RStudio in OpenSAFELY

    We have added a new way of working with R code in OpenSAFELY, with the addition of the opensafely launch rstudio command. This will start up an instance of RStudio using our official OpenSAFELY R image, and automatically open a web browser window on your computer pointing at the RStudio interface. You…

  6. Exposing more columns for HES data

    We have exposed two more columns on the admitted patient care table from the HES data: discharge_destination and discharge_method. These are examples of data that are held in the backend database, but that had not been exposed via ehrQL. We’re always happy to add existing data to ehrQL, but typically we wait for…

  7. Exposing the Decision Support Values table in ehrQL

    We have made the TPP DecisionSupportValues table available in ehrQL.

  8. OpenSAFELY codelists add command

    We have improved the way in which codelists can be added to an OpenSAFELY project. Previously, to add a codelist to a project, one had to manually add a codelist and version identifier to the codelists.txt file, then run the opensafely codelists update command to download it. This method is still supported. We have…

  9. Updated NHS Digital Primary Care Refsets

    Many OpenSAFELY studies have made use of the NHS Digital Primary Care Domain Reference Sets [archived here]. These are republished on opencodelists.org under the NHSD Primary Care Domain Refsets organisation to make integration of these reference sets into your study easy. Based on user feedback, we have updated…

  10. Improved autocomplete for ehrQL

    We have made significant improvements to the autocomplete behaviour when writing ehrQL in VSCode, both locally and in online codespace environments.

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