Study/Trial contacts

[feserm]

I have some questions regarding the contacts field in Study and Trial:

• Is there a reason for why this is not using the Person Entity but using its own scheme?
• If not using Person, is the Contact created through POST /studies and POST /trials? And why is the contactDbId set by the user? Or how would someone ensure, that it is uniquely identifying?

[BrapiCoordinatorSelby]

I agree the Person entity and Contact entity should be more aligned.

I believe that creating a Contact through POST /studies and POST /trials is still important because there are use cases where the contact person might not be a registered user in the system, or a particular database doesn't support the /people calls for accessing their users.

[sebastian-raubach]

Just to add another opinion to this, I'm just looking at various endpoints that reference some kind of individual and it seems this would be a candidate for some unification across the whole API. For example, there is the /people endpoint which can be associated with a program or a listdetail. At the same time, trial has a contacts field that (from what I understand) is aligned with a MIAPPE person. Then there's also the quite generic uploadedBy (string) on POST /observations which says it can be either a name or an id. I feel like all these use-cases would benefit from reusing the same people entity that already exists within BrAPI.

So, basically, I agree with @feserm but would potentially also include the uploadedBy field in observation into the same entity.