Imagine you’re walking down the street on a nice summer’s day, and someone walks up to you and says “Hey, you work at InterSystems, right? I’ve been hearing more and more about InterSystems IRIS lately. I know IRIS has its own programing language called ObjectBook? or InstaScript? OK, I admit it, I know it’s called ObjectScript! I know IRIS also supports Python. I’m a Python developer, so that sounds great to me. But I’m also interested in ObjectScript. For example, Python and other languages support collections. Does ObjectScript support collections?”

You’d answer “Of course!”

And then your new friend might get excited and start firing off more questions:

• How many kinds of collections does ObjectScript support?
• Can ObjectScript use Python collections?
• Can Python use ObjectScript collections?
• Which collection is best?

How would you answer? Well, you don’t have to worry about answering. All you’d have to do is send your new friend the URL of this long page.

The IRIS Installation Guide for Linux, Installation Directory section, says "Do not choose the /home directory, any of its subdirectories, or the /usr/local/etc/irissys directory." but there are no suggestions or any default.

What are your opinions on this? For example, I see that IRIS in a Docker container is installed in /usr/irissys. I'm wondering why that directory was chosen.

The official Linux filesystem docs say:

• /usr is the second major section of the filesystem./usr is shareable, read-only data.

On 2024-08-29, the team released Language Server v2.6.0, which includes more improvements for code completion (aka intellisense). That means that #dim, while still useful, is hardly necessary anymore. That's a good thing in my opinion.

This post from last year (Intellisense and code completion in VS code objectscript) talked about using #dim for code completion for OREFs. #dim has always been useful for both Studio and VS Code.But last year, VS Code ObjectScript was slightly behind Studio in this area, and #dim helped bridge that gap.But now, VS Code has surpassed Studio.

Methods written in ObjectScript can use pass-by-reference arguments to return information to the caller. Python doesn’t support pass-by-reference arguments, so Embedded Python in IRIS doesn’t support them either. That's it, that's the end of the post, hope you liked it. 😉 But wait, what about the Classic Rock & Roll?

Actually, since returning values in method arguments can be useful, this post demonstrates several ways to do this, between ObjectScript and Embedded Python. So let’s start with the simplest example: calling an ObjectScript method that already has a pass-by-reference argument from

Hi all,

When is a Developer Community post not a Developer Community post? When it's just a few sentences wrapped around a link to InterSystems documentation! And what better way to finish up 2021 than by telling you about something cool that's been available since v2020.3? As the ball drops in Times Square, curl up with this:

Repeating Previous Commands

I think it will bring you joy! Post your favorite aliases below. Happy New Year!

A few years ago, I was teaching the basics of our %UnitTest framework during Caché Foundations class (now called Developing Using InterSystems Objects and SQL). A student asked if it was possible to collect performance statistics while running unit tests. A few weeks later, I added some additional code to the %UnitTest examples to answer this question. I’m finally sharing it on the Community.

When an error occurs in your application, simply logging it might be enough. But for certain errors, you might want to send a notification to people right away. There are three ways to generate custom email notifications from InterSystems IRIS.

In most cases, if one class depends on another, the class compiler will detect this and determine the correct compilation order. For example:

• Compiling a superclass triggers compilation of its subclasses.
• Compiling a custom datatype class triggers compilation of any classes with a property of that type.

Yet sometimes, a developer needs to specify compilation order. InterSystems class definitions contain two keywords for this, DependsOn and CompileAfter, that are very similar but not identical.

This morning on the old Caché Google Group, someone posed the following question, which I've decided to answer here, because it's interesting!

Is there a way to iterate ClassMethod's params, and get param's names and values?

The first answer I can come up with is: it's not easy! In any method, you could try to write code like this (where methodName is the name of your method):

    set method = ##class(%Dictionary.MethodDefinition).IDKEYOpen($classname(), methodName)
    set args = method.FormalSpec
    for i=1:1:$length(args, ",") {
        set arg = $piece($piece(args, ",", i), ":", 1)

The list of tags is pretty long, and it will probably get longer. I guess it could be a tag cloud somewhere on the page, but I'm not sure where. I bet others in the Community can suggest good ways to do this!

In the Caché Foundations course, students are learning about Caché Development and ObjectScript syntax at the same time. To help students complete the exercises, we provide an ObjectScript Quick Reference (aka "the Cheat Sheet").

It is not a reference for all of ObjectScript! It is a list of the ObjectScript commands and functions that students use during the course, along with common syntax for objects, collections, etc. It also contains some useful macros.

We are providing a pdf version to the Developer Community.