Article
· Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

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Hi Developers!

Recently we published on Docker Hub images for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS Community for Health containers.

What is that?

There is a repository that publishes it, and in fact, it is the same container IRIS Community Edition containers you have on official InterSystems listing which have the pre-loaded ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) client.

So if you run this container with IRIS CE or IRIC CE for Health you can immediately start using ZPM and install packages from Community Registry or any others.

What does this mean for you?

It means, that anyone can deploy any of your InterSystems ObjectScript application in 3 commands:

  • run IRIS container;
  • open terminal;
  • install your application as ZPM package.

It is safe, fast and cross-platform.

It's really handy if you want to test a new interesting ZPM package and not harm any of your systems.

Suppose, you have docker-desktop installed. You can run the image, which wiil pull the latest container if you don't have it locally:

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Hi Developers!

Many of you are looking for samples on how to work with InterSystems IRIS Analytics, formerly known as DeepSee.

There is a Samples BI module with Patients and Holefoods examples which is available on Github with source code. The installation steps are clear but take time.

Recently we added the option to run IRIS Community Edition containers with ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) on board. This simplifies the installation to the "run-one-command" step for the modules submitted to ZPM Community Registry. And thus we can benefit the Samples BI installation with ZPM.

And here is how you can run it on your laptop. Let's go!

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Article
· Jan 16, 2020 2m read
Python Gateway VI: Jupyter Notebook

This series of articles would cover Python Gateway for InterSystems Data Platforms. Execute Python code and more from InterSystems IRIS. This project brings you the power of Python right into your InterSystems IRIS environment:

  • Execute arbitrary Python code
  • Seamlessly transfer data from InterSystems IRIS into Python
  • Build intelligent Interoperability business processes with Python Interoperability Adapter
  • Save, examine, modify and restore Python context from InterSystems IRIS

Other articles

The plan for the series so far (subject to change).

Intro

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

This extension allows you to browse and edit InterSystems IRIS BPL processes as jupyter notebooks.

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Hi Developers!

Often when we install a code package we want to make some post-install settings, e.g. call to a method, set up a configuration file.

This article describes how to do this with the ObjectScript Package Manager.

To make any post-install calls you need to add <Invoke> elements into <Invokes> tag to the module.xml. Each <Invoke> element can have nested <Arg> elements if you want to pass params to the method:

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In the previous part of this series, we saw how to include data in a portlet from within DeepSee. This used the built in data controller. In this part, we are going to be pulling in data from outside of DeepSee. This will include both information from within InterSystems IRIS and from the OS.

Why use this?

This is useful if you would like to create a dashboard that only contains information about your system. It is also useful if you want to display data about your system along side data that you have stored in DeepSee.

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Article
· Jan 13, 2020 1m read
Difference between while and for

While and for are pretty similar, but sometimes you need to do a not recommended thing - change cycle boundaries.

In this situation while and for are different. For calculates boundaries once per run and while calculates boundaries on every iteration.

Consider this code sample:

set x = 5
for i=1:1:x {
     write "i: ", i,", x: ", x,!
     set x = x+1
}

You'll get this output:

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Hi Developers!

Suppose you published your application on Open Exchange with version 1.00. And then you've added a new outstanding feature and you make a new release.

You can also make a new release of your application on Open Exchange.

Why make releases on Open Exchange?

This the way for you to highlight the new features of your application. When you publish a new release the following happens:

Release notes appear on the News page of Open Exchange

The version of your app changes

Version History tab is updated

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When using Related Cubes in InterSystems IRIS BI, cubes must be built in the proper order. The One side must be built before the Many side. This is because during build time for the Many side, it looks up the record on the One side and creates a link. If the referenced record is not found on the One side, a Missing Relationship build error is generated. The One side is going to be the independent side of the relationship, AKA the side of the relationship that is referenced by the Many side or the Dependent cube. For example: Patients contain a reference to their Doctor.

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Some readers of my previous article, Caché eXTreme for .NET - direct access to globals from C#, wondered if you could access information not just from the same instance in which you’re working, but also from another instance on the same computer, or from an instance located on another computer in the same local network. Some theorized, correctly, that this would be possible using the Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). In this article I’m going to show how it can be done.

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Have you ever needed a math function but could not find what you needed and ended up writing your own? Look no further! ObjectScript-Math is here to solve all your math related function needs.

ObjectScript-Math is an Open Source library for ObjectScript Math functions. It is now available on Open Exchange. This library contains a mix of new functions that are not currently available and functions that are available. The existing functions will be wrapped for use from ObjectScript-Math so that all Math functions can have a central location.

This library will continue to grow, so give it a try and give your feedback!

Don't see what you are looking for? Please feel free to submit requests for additional functions or contribute code yourself!

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What is %SQLRESTRICT

%SQLRESTRICT is a special %FILTER clause for use in MDX queries in InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence. Since this function begins with %, it means this is a special MDX extension created by InterSystems. It allows users to insert an SQL statement that will be used to restrict the returned records in the MDX Result Set. This SQL statement must return a set of Source Record IDs to limit the results by. Please see the documentation for more information.

Why is this useful?

This is useful because there are often times users want to restrict the results in their MDX Result Set based on information that is not in their cubes. It may be the case that this information may not make sense to be in the cube. Other times this can be useful when there is a large set of values you want to restrict. As mentioned before, this is not a standard MDX function, it was created by InterSystems to handle cases were queries were not performing well or cases that were not easily solved by existing functions.

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Article
· Dec 31, 2019 3m read
Portlets that use data from DeepSee


In the previous part of this series, we saw how to reference a web page that will enhance our dashboard experience. Now we will look into referencing data that is already in our cubes.

In this example, we will be referencing the controller object and we will be extracting data from it. This data will then be displayed as text in our Dashboard. In Part 5, we will show how to incorporate this data into other charting libraries.

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Article
· Apr 12, 2017 5m read
Bug killing development tips

Does anyone NOT use a debugger? I can't remember the last time I did. It's not because I don't dislike them, I just don't need to use them. The main reason for this is because I have a certain development methodology that either produces less bugs, catches them at a unit test level, or makes tracking them down much easier.

Here are my tips...

1. Write your own COS cheat-sheet.

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In the first article I started discussing RESTForms - REST API for your persistent classes. We talked about basic features, now, I'd like to discuss advanced features - mainly queries capabilites:

  • Basic queries
  • Query arguments
  • Custom queries

Queries

Queries allow getting slices of data, based on arbitrary criteria. There are two query types in RESTForms:

  • Basic queries work for all RESTForms classes once defined and they differ only by the field list
  • Custom queries work only for the classes in which they are specified and available, but the developer has full access to query text
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In the previous part of this series, we saw how to define a basic portlet. Now we will look into making this portlet reference a web page that will enhance our dashboard experience.

In this example, we will be embedding a Developer Community article along side a couple of widgets displaying information related to the number of views on the Developer Community articles. This example is not hosted on the Community Analytics server, but if it was we could see the view counts going up as we interacted with the page.

Why use this?

In a real case, perhaps you have an embedded page from an external web site showing the current Emergency Room wait times for Hospitals in your area. This portlet can be used along side widgets from your Emergency Room showing how many people are waiting, how many doctors are active, and how many people are being treated. As other Emergency Room wait times grow, you can possibly expect your volume to increase as well. This can help you make decisions on how to allocate resources.

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Article
· Dec 12, 2019 2m read
Creating Portlets in DeepSee

What is a portlet?

The simple answer is: a custom widget. A portlet can exist by itself on a DeepSee dashboard, it can be used along side standard DeepSee widgets, or along side other portlets. The rendering of the custom widget is completely user defined. This means you can embed a web page, create a form to perform any sort of action needed based on the data on your dashboard, use third party charting libraries, or simply display data from outside of a DeepSee cube.

How to get started

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Article
· Dec 9, 2019 1m read
ÍàØâàÞæØâë and you

If you work with anything other than English, you would earlier or later encounter the characters from the title or just plain ??????????.

Encodings are usually known, but sometimes you just get gibberish and need to make sense of it.

In this cases $zcvt is your friend, the three argument form specifically.

But there are a lot of options. So here's an utility script to check how the text would look like in different encodings:

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Article
· Mar 28, 2019 2m read
ObjectScript error handling snippets

ObjectScript has at least three ways of handling errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE, etc.). Most of the system code uses statuses but exceptions are easier to handle for a number of reasons. Working with legacy code you spend some time translating between the different techniques. I use these snippets a lot for reference. Hopefully they're useful to others as well.

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