Can we know the original type of SearchParamDefinition?

[whyfate]

The original data type of Token may be Identifier, Coding, Code, etc. http://hl7.org/fhir/search.html#token.
It would be great if we could get the original data type in SearchParamDefinition.

[ewoutkramer]

That's pretty hard, since there's no 1-on-1 relationship between the search parameter (which is defined as a FhirPath expression) and the elements used by this expression. Sure, if the FhirPath expression is a simple walk into the instance to a single element, you could lookup the datatype of the element in the StructureDefinition, but -although common- this can only be done for a subset of the search parameters. And it is still not trivial.

[whyfate]

Thanks, but this is really bad news.