Article
· Oct 23, 2019 2m read
Unit Tests for Data Transforms

Would you like to be sure your data transforms work as expected with a single command? And what about writing unit tests for your data transforms in a quick and simple way?

When talking about interoperability, there are usually a lot of data transforms involved. Those data transforms are used to convert data between different systems or applications in your code, so they are running a very important job.

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InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.

In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.

In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.

There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:

  • Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
  • Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
  • Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
  • High availability configuration
  • etc.
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InterSystems Data Platforms products allow you to export and import security settings in two different ways.

This article talks about those options:
- On the command line, using ^SECURITY
- Programmatically, using the Export and Import methods of classes in the Security package

Exporting settings on the command line (^SECURITY)

You can export everything or individual sections of the security settings.

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Are you all ready for something you wish you knew ages ago (or, in my case, a DECADE ago)? Open up a portal in your favorite instance and go to:

System Administration->Configuration->Additional Settings->Startup

Scroll down to "Terminal Prompt" and click 'Edit'. This allows you to edit what you see on your terminal prompt. You can change that to my current setting: 8,3,2

What does this do? It adds your instance name for your prompt. So now your prompt can look like:

DEVELOPMENT:USER>

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$LIST string format and %DynamicArray and %DynamicObject classes

IRIS, and previously Cache, contain several different ways to create a sequence containing a mixture of data values. A data sequence that has been available for many years is the $LIST string. Another more recent data sequence is the %DynamicArray class, which along with the %DynamicObject class, is part of the IRIS support for JSON string representation. These two sequences involve very different tradeoffs.

$LIST String Format

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How can you allow computers to trust one another in your absence while maintaining security and privacy?

“A Dry Martini”, he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
"Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1953


OAuth helps to separate services with user credentials from “working” databases, both physically and geographically. It thereby strengthens the protection of identification data and, if necessary, helps you comply with the requirements of countries' data protection laws.

With OAuth, you can provide the user with the ability to work safely from multiple devices at once, while "exposing" personal data to various services and applications as little as possible. You can also avoid taking on "excess" data about users of your services (i.e. you can process data in a depersonalized form).

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Every developer has made the mistake of accidentally leaving temporary debug code in place when they meant to remove it after debugging is complete. The great thing about writing in ObjectScript is that there is a way to make temporary code be truly temporary and automatically self-destruct! This can also be done in such a way that the code has no change of making it into your source control stream, which can be helpful as well.

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Hi Developers!

When you prepare your modules for ZPM (InterSystems Package Manager) it expects the certain directory structure for ObjectScript source files.

ObjectScript in your source folder need to be stored by types in the following subfolders. E.g. if you have the source folder named as /src the structure should be as follows:

/src

/cls - for classes

/inc - for include files

/mac - for mac files

/int - for interpretable files

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At least three different ways to process errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE etc is given in ObjectScript. Most systems have status, but for a range of reasons exceptions are more convenient to manage. You spend some time translating between the various techniques dealing with legacy code. For reference, I use several of these excerpts. It is hoped that they will also support others.

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Hi Developers!

Recently we launched InterSystems Package Manager - ZPM. And one of the intentions of the ZPM is to let you package your solution and submit into the ZPM registry to make its deployment as simple as "install your-package" command.

To do that you need to introduce module.xml file into your repository which describes what is your InterSystems IRIS package consists of.

This article describes different parts of module.xml and will help you to craft your own.

I will start from samples-objectscript package, which installs into IRIS the Sample ObjectScript application and could be installed with:

zpm: USER>install samples-objectscript

It is probably the simplest package ever and here is the module.xml which describes the package:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Export generator="Cache" version="25">
  <Document name="samples-objectscript.ZPM">
    <Module>
      <Name>samples-objectscript</Name>
      <Version>1.0.0</Version>
      <Packaging>module</Packaging>
      <SourcesRoot>src</SourcesRoot>
      <Resource Name="ObjectScript.PKG"/>
    </Module>
  </Document>
</Export>

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In an ever-changing world, companies must innovate to stay competitive. This ensures that they’ll make decisions with agility and safety, aiming for future results with greater accuracy.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools help companies make intelligent decisions instead of relying on trial and error. These intelligent decisions can make the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.
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Hi Developers!

Often I find questions on how to install IRIS, connect to IRIS from IDE, setup the environment, compile, debug, maintain the repository.

Here below possibly the shortest way to set up all the environment and start development with ObjectScript on InterSystems IRIS.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have Git, Docker, and VSCode installed

Install Docker and ObjectScript extensions into VSCode

Sign in or Create an account on Github

Here we go!

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In this article, we will explore the development of an IRIS client for consuming RESTful API services that have been developed to the OData API standard.

We will be exploring a number of built-in IRIS libraries for making HTTP requests, reading and writing to JSON payloads, and seeing how we can use them in combination to build a generic client adaptor for OData. We will also explore the new JSON adapter for deserializing JSON into persistent objects.

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Hi Developers!

InterSystems Package Manager (ZPM) is a great thing, but it is even better if you don't need to install it but can use immediately.

There are several ways how to do this and here is one approach of having IRIS container with ZPM built with dockerfile.

I've prepared a repository which has a few lines in dockerfile which perform the download and install the latest version of ZPM.

Add these lines to your standard dockerfile for IRIS community edition and you will have ZPM installed and ready to use.

To download the latest ZPM client:

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Hi Developers!

Often when we develop some library, tool, package, whatever on InterSystems ObjectScript we have a question, how we deploy this package on the target machine?

Also, we often expect that some other libraries already installed, so our package depends on them, and often on some particular version of it.

When you code on javascript, python, etc the role of packages deployment with dependency management takes package manager.

So, I'm pleased to announce that InterSystems ObjectScript Package Manager available!

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Our team is reworking an application to use REST services that use the same database as our current ZEN application. One of the new REST endpoints uses a query that ran very slowly when first implemented. After some analysis, we found that an index on one of the fields in the table greatly improved performance (a query that took 35 seconds was now taking a fraction of a second).

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Article
· Aug 21, 2019 2m read
ToolBox-4-Iris

Hello everyone,
After some work with IRIS we want to share our ToolBox-4-Iris with you.

What is this about?

The ToolBox-4-Iris is an API for IRIS with a collection of handy and useful tools - features that are not available in IRIS, but greatly simplify application development. To save time and effort on the "typical tools" that every developer needs. This includes additional classes, individual methods or even more efficient macros, which are described in the respective packages.

Content

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Object Synchronization is a feature that has been around for a while, since Caché days, but I wanted to explore a bit more how it works. I've always thought that database automatic synchronization is complex by nature but, for some particular scenarios shouldn't be so hard. So I considered a very simple use case (OK, perhaps the typical one, I'm not discovering anything... but if it's common and it works, it's good wink ).

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Article
· Aug 14, 2019 9m read
Introducing InterSystems API Manager

As you might have heard, we just introduced the InterSystems API Manager (IAM); a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement.

In this article, I will show you how to set up IAM and highlight some of the many capabilities IAM allows you to leverage.

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