I joined InterSystems less than a year ago. Diving into ObjectScript and IRIS was exciting, but also full of small surprises that tripped me up at the beginning. In this article I collect the most common mistakes I, and many new colleagues, make, explain why they happen, and show concrete examples and practical fixes. My goal is to help other new developers save time and avoid the same bumps in the road.

1. Getting lost among system classes and where to start

Hi Community,

This is my first post in the developer community - would appreciate any feedback!

For testing or demo purposes, you may want to send emails from your Interoperability Production. In this post then I will walk you through connecting an InterSystems IRIS Production to Gmail so you can use it to send emails alerts.
 

1. Set up a new Gmail

Welcome, dear members of the Community!

In this article, we will present an example of a project implementing a FHIR-based solution. This project will be based on the national project (Spanish national project), known as ÚNICAS.

What is ÚNICAS?

In his own words:

A project whose objective is to create an ecosystem of partnerships to improve healthcare for pediatric patients with complex rare diseases (RMDs). This project is being implemented through the network within the National Health System (NHS) to improve the diagnosis and care of patients with rare diseases.

Hi Community,

We’re excited to share a brand-new Instruqt tutorial: 

🧑‍🏫 RAG using InterSystems IRIS Vector Search

This hands-on lab walks you through building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot powered by InterSystems IRIS Vector Search. You’ll see how vector search can be leveraged to deliver up-to-date and accurate responses, combining the strengths of IRIS with generative AI.

✨ Why try it?

Another step in this implementation path, adding cross cloud, cross regional stretched IrisCluster with Mirroring + Disaster Recovery using the Intersystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) and Tailscale

Though trivial, Id like to go multi-cloud with the stretched IrisCluster for a couple of reasons to socialize the power of Wireguard when it supplies the network for a properly zoned IrisCluster by adding another mirror role to Amazon Web Services in the Western United States based datacenter in Oregon.

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform is a comprehensive, multi-model, multi-workload data platform that is ideal for accommodating the challenging requirements of applications for the Internet of Things. It is a complete platform for developing, executing, and maintaining IoT applications in a single, consistent, unified environment. It features a distributed architecture to support massive data-ingest rates and data volumes, while providing the flexibility and durability of an enterprise-grade transactional multi-model database to ingest, process, and persist data from a wide range of devices in different formats. It features a complete set of integration, event-processing, and integrated analytics capabilities, including full SQL support and text processing, business process orchestration, and a standards-based development environment.

Connect to, ingest, and persist a wide range of disparate device data types and formats

The data types associated with IoT applications are often heterogeneous, as they may originate from various devices with diverse functions and manufactured by different vendors. The underlying data platform must be able to ingest and process a wide range of raw data types in their original formats. Many applications also require the data platform to persist all of the disparate source data to detect deviations from normal ranges, accommodate downstream ad hoc analytics, maintain regulatory compliance, and fulfill other purposes.

Hello community,

is anybody located in the DACH area healthcare sector working with Dedalus Orbis as patient master and uses a custom HL7 schema for parsing Orbis message structures into Health Connect?

We're facing a migration and I ask myself if I have to create a schema by myself, based on the pdf documentation given by the company. This is a tedious task,  so hopefully there is somebody out there willing to share his or her experience.

Kind regards,

Martin 

Introduction

HL7 messages often contain multiple repeating segments such as NTE, AL1, OBX, ZTX, DG1, and others. These segments sometimes require individual processing and routing to different downstream systems. This technical paper introduces a configurable template designed to automate the splitting of these repeating HL7 segments, improving message handling and integration efficiency.

I work a lot with IRIS BI, but some features are still a mystery to me. There is a great feature here that allows you to create expressions in Architect.
  
I'm already very familiar with it, but I still don't quite understand what environment it uses.

The default request class, Ens.Request is fine for our initial workflow.  

We want to define other workflows that will reuse the same BPL class.  These workflows would send messages inbound to the BPL as different request classes.

Is this possible or is it required that we send in a request class matching the context request class in the context tab?

Thank you

What are the best practices for choosing a shard key in InterSystems IRIS to ensure long-term scalability without needing major refactoring later?

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ InterSystems Different by Design @ Ready 2025

Hi, Community!

🔥Does your organization work with HL7® FHIR® resources and need training, now or in the future?

Learning Services is exploring whether to create a new instructor-led course on FHIR support in InterSystems IRIS® for Health and HealthShare® Health Connect.

If you’re involved in approving or recommending training for your team, we’d love your input! Please take a few minutes to complete this short survey.

Your feedback will help us understand both current and future demand so we can build training that supports your needs.

Thanks in advance for sharing your perspective!

👉Take the survey.

hi everyone

we are migrating a legacy script that uploads the files to a SharePoint site through webdav to Health Connect engine.

I wonder if anyone has ever done that, if yes, what did you do to achieve this?

thanks in advance,

Frank

One of the most common kinds of integration we are asked to do is emailing. One of the most typical email services our customers use is Microsoft’s Office 365. After setting up the right configuration on the Microsoft side, we can email from IRIS with two HTTP requests. By the end of this article, we will be able to send an email with an attachment through our Microsoft 365 service!

Hello Community

The InitialExpression keyword values does not to set default values for properties in classes that extend %CSP.Page, unlike in other class types such as %Persistent or %RegisteredObject, where it works as expected during object instantiation (typically via %New()).

1. Is %CSP.Page instantiated using %New() under the hood, or does it use a different initialization mechanism?
2. Are there specific limitations or behaviors in CSP pages that prevent InitialExpression from working as expected?

Thank you!

I still remember the very first code I wrote in Object Script

Coming from Python, it felt so strange at first, but over time I started to see why the language was built the way it is.

If you’re just starting out, keep in mind that ObjectScript might feel a bit niche and mostly tied to IRIS products, but the way you work with it can really pay off - fast development, a powerful database, and a solid platform to learn on.

Sometimes it feels like you’ve stepped into a world that’s both familiar and different.

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review, just let me know.

Hey Community,

The InterSystems team recently held another monthly Developer Meetup in the AWS Boston office location in the Seaport, breaking our all-time attendance record with over 80 attendees! This meetup was our second time being hosted by our friends at AWS, and the venue was packed with folks excited to learn from our awesome speakers.

Hi,

Just thought I'd share quite a handy hook that has helped me out when developing on Health Connect Cloud with VS Code and GitBash. When developing on Health Connect Cloud, if changes are made directly on the server such as routing rules or component deployments, they aren't automatically included in source control, therefore you must export from the server into your local files and push to your remote repo. I'm sure there are easier methods to deal with that which I'm in the process of testing, but as a quick solution I thought it would be handy have a pre-commit hook which triggers a reminder in GitBash - see below.

Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

• Does not support access mode "ReadWriteMany"
• Does not support being mounted on more than one pod at a time
• Does not support access across availability zones

Hi Community,

We're excited to share the new video in the "Rarified Air" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Leading with Empathy: The Human Side of Customer Centricity

Vanna.AI - Personalized AI InterSystems OMOP Agent

The utility returns the desired values from the text and display the multiple values if exists based on starting and ending string.

Class Test.Utility.FunctionSet Extends %RegisteredObject
{

/// W !,##class(Test.Utility.FunctionSet).ExtractValues("Some random text VALUE=12345; some other VALUE=2345; more text VALUE=345678;","VALUE=",";")
 

Building a Sensor Data Demo with Spring Boot and InterSystems IRIS

In the era of IoT and connected devices, sensor data is everywhere—tracking temperature in logistics, monitoring equipment performance, or recording environmental conditions. But capturing, storing, and analyzing this data in real time requires more than just hardware sensors.

Finishing my previous example for multiple IRIS instances, I tried
to compose a local single instance version.  The step from the external
Python app to a version using embedded Python seemed to be obvious.
This was a wrong assumption, as some Python libraries just refused installation
into my local Windows-based environment.

With InterSystems industry-standard certification exams, you and your team can get certified to validate your skills and demonstrate your expertise in InterSystems technology. Find the right exam for your role!

In Studio, is it possible to call a dialog with a single input text field inside a custom Studio.Extension.Base.CheckIn method?

Update: The AI Bot just answered, not sure why it was at loss before I posted.

In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db  .

Prereq: 

• Have ODBC driver installed in your device. You can download it from here: Download ODBC Driver for SQL Server - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn. 
• Have SQL Server and IRIS installed in your device
• Have SQL Server connection Authentication enabled in SQL server