About the Technical Specification

This technical specification identifies the data files for distributing the information contained in the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set. A table for each CCDD file provides the format and description of the attributes within each of the files.  

The files are accessible from the Infoway Terminology Gateway (https://tgateway.infoway-inforoute.ca/ccdd.html) and provided in four data formats:  CSV, Excel, XML and JSON. Double quotes are used as text qualifiers, however, double quotes are not used on the attribute headings.  All strings are coded in UTF-8 and in the CSV format the line terminators used for all files will be Unix (LF).  The order of columns in the files may not match the table order as below. The CSV and Excel formats are the preferred formats that align with additional information in this technical specification and the CCDD editorial guidelines.  

The XML and JSON formats available on the Infoway Terminology Gateway provide an additional “Terminology Gateway Status” attribute that is not present in the Excel or csv formats

The allowable values for the “Terminology Gateway Status” in the XML format are:

• “true”; represented as “<active>true</active>”.  Concepts with this value may have a CCDD lifecycle status (i.e., an mp_status, ntp_status or tm_status as a property) of “Active, Inactive or Deprec” and should be considered for use by processes and systems consuming this format. 

• “false”; represented as “<active>false</active>”.  Concepts with this value should be ignored by systems and processes consuming this format; they are no longer present in the CCDD. 

The allowable values for “Terminology Gateway Status” in the JSON format are:

• “true”; represented as “active”: true.  Concept with this value may have a CCDD lifecycle status (i.e., an mp_status, ntp_status or tm_status as a property) of “Active, Inactive or Deprec” and should be considered for use by processes and systems consuming this format. 

• “false”; represented as “active”: false.  Concepts with this value should be ignored by systems and processes consuming this format; they are no longer present in the CCDD.