/// <summary>
/// Returns given <see cref="IType"/> as a pipe-encoded string, using the given encoding characters.
/// <para>
/// It is assumed that the Type represents a complete field rather than a component.
/// </para>
/// </summary>
/// <param name="source">An <see cref="IType"/> object from which to construct an encoded string.</param>
/// <param name="encodingChars">Encoding characters to be used.</param>
/// <returns>The encoded type.</returns>
/// <exception cref="HL7Exception">Thrown if the data fields in the group do not permit encoding (e.g. required fields are null).</exception>
/// <exception cref="EncodingNotSupportedException">Thrown if the requested encoding is not supported by this parser.</exception>
public static string Encode(IType source, EncodingCharacters encodingChars)
{
if (source is Varies)
{
var varies = (Varies)source;
if (varies.Data != null)
{
source = varies.Data;
}
}
var field = new StringBuilder();
for (var i = 1; i <= Terser.NumComponents(source); i++)
{
var comp = new StringBuilder();
for (var j = 1; j <= Terser.NumSubComponents(source, i); j++)
{
var p = Terser.GetPrimitive(source, i, j);
comp.Append(EncodePrimitive(p, encodingChars));
comp.Append(encodingChars.SubcomponentSeparator);
}
field.Append(StripExtraDelimiters(comp.ToString(), encodingChars.SubcomponentSeparator));
field.Append(encodingChars.ComponentSeparator);
}
return(StripExtraDelimiters(field.ToString(), encodingChars.ComponentSeparator));
}