For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

4. FHIR Artifacts

This section provides a central index of all FHIR artifacts defined in this Implementation Guide (IG). These include:

• Profiles
• Extensions
• Terminology
• Examples
• Response Handling
• Downloads

4.1. Transmission Specification

The formal MIME types for FHIR resources are application/fhir+json and application/fhir+xml. The correct MIME type SHALL be used by clients and servers:

• JSON (preferred): application/fhir+json
• XML (optional): application/fhir+xml

FHIR® uses UTF-8 for all request and response bodies. Since the HTTP specification defines a default character encoding of ISO-8859-1, requests and responses SHALL explicitly set the character encoding to UTF-8 using the charset parameter of the MIME-type in the Content-Type header. Requests MAY also specify this charset parameter in the Accept header and/or use the Accept-Charset header.

Accept-Language field in HTTP header will be used to set the language of the search in the future releases. The allowed values are en-CA and fr-CA. If this field is not set by the requestor, the default is en-CA. In the current release, only en-CA is supported.