Article
· Oct 4, 2016 1m read
How to Parse a URL in Caché

How to parse a URL in Caché:

Let's pretend you are working on a project where you may be retrieving a URL for some purpose and you have the need to be easily able to parse apart that URL to get the various components that make up the URL.

Here's how to do that:

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Article
· May 16, 2016 11m read
Accelerate Ensemble

Introducing non-persistent messages. eXpert-to-eXpert

Background

InterSystems Ensemble as a tool does a lot for the Developer. One of the nice features is the Message trace utility. It shows a message flow diagram. The diagram shows the progress of the message processing real time. You can get many-many useful information from the production. In any case, someone needs to find a bug in a production implementation, without the Message trace utility it could turn into a real nightmare.

On the other hand, keeping message “traceability” is not for free. A heavy loaded production can very quickly run out of resources just because of the house keeping functions of Ensemble. House keeping functions such as maintaining message header, log entries, message queue generates a significant load on the Caché database used by Ensemble.

This article is about to show how to force Ensemble work more for the everyday life, instead of being prepared for “any-time-debugging”.

This is an eXpert-to-eXpert article. Therefore, I assume the deep understanding of Ensemble.

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Article
· Oct 6, 2016 4m read
RESTful Exception Handling

A beginner’s guide to Exception Handling in RESTful web services. The article gives an example how the various error conditions during processing a service request can be handled.

We expect our client – server communication working in a flawless operational condition, running error free software. But we are prepared to handle exceptions. Are we? So far in the examples of the previous sessions were not. We did not care about exceptions. The result? In any error incident it took ages to figure out what the problem is and more importantly how to fix it.

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Hi Community,

Did you know about OWASP and Top Ten Web Application security risks to your Web API or Web Apps?

OWASP is a community foundation created to help us to improve the security of web apps/web APIs. OWASP do the web apps more secure through its community-led open source software projects, hundreds of chapters worldwide, tens of thousands of members, and by hosting local and global conferences.

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Those of you who keep an eye on developments in the mainstream of IT will be aware that a major upheaval has been occurring over the last 5 or so years, in which JavaScript has exploded in popularity and importance. Largely as a result of its server-side incarnation - Node.js - it has broken free of just being the scripting language that you use in web browser, to becoming the world's most popular language and enterprise technology of choice.

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Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

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This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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APM normally focuses on the activity of the application but gathering information about system usage gives you important background information that helps understand and manage the performance of your application so I am including the IRIS History Monitor in this series.

In this article I will briefly describe how you start the IRIS or Caché History Monitor to build a record of the system level activity to go with the application activity and performance information you gather. I will also give examples of SQL to access the information.

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We finished our last lesson with our Widgets Direct page iterating over a list of widgets, displaying an ID and a Name value. While we have been able to achieve this with only a small amount of coding, the page itself is not the most visually appealing place to be. The AngularJS framework is providing a powerful Model-View-Controller framework for our structure and logic, but it does not implement anything that will provide a nice UI experience.

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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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Our Pledge

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and manager pledge to making participation in InterSystems Developer Community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:

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For Global Summit 2016, I set out to showcase a Reference Architecture I had been working on for a National Provider Directory solution with State Level Instances and a National Instance all running HealthShare Provider Directory and all running on AWS Infrastructure.

In short, I wanted to highlight:

  • The implementation of Amazon Web Services to provision the infrastructure, including the auto-creation of the state level instances through Cloud Formation.
  • The use of the HSPD Broadcast functionality to Notify Upstream Systems Changes in Master Provider Data.
  • The implementation of a transformation of the standard Broadcast Object to HL7 MFN for interoperability.
  • The principals of Master Data Management applied to the Provider Directory.

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Greetings! This article describes yet another simple way of creating installers for the solutions based on InterSystems Caché. The topic covers applications, which can be installed or completely removed from Caché with one action only. If you are still documenting installation instructions that have more than one step to do to install your application — it’s high time you automated this process.

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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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Hello.

The idea of this post is to introduce Frontier: An abstraction layer that allows Rapid REST development.

REQUIREMENTS:

Why?

Have you ever found yourself dealing with repetitive tasks like mounting objects, serializing them and eventually handling multiple errors for multiple cases? Frontier can boost your development by making you focus on what really matters: your application.

Frontier is made to stop you from WRITE'ing by instead forcing your methods to return values.
It's designed to make you code clean, and you'll see the why pretty soon.

This is the Part 1, where you'll learn he basics about how to work with Frontier. That means at the end of this part you should be capable of

creating GET requests without difficulties. Since this also serves as a way to introduce the framework, I'll be calling this part: Core concepts.

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If I have defined a class query in one of my classes and I want to use that query from a method of another class, what are the pros and cons of using the %SQL.Statement interface versus the %Library.ResultSet interface?

I believe %SQL.Statement is the newer interface.

So if the old way is:

USER>s rs=##class(%Library.ResultSet).%New("%Library.File:FileSet")
 
USER>s sc=rs.Execute("c:\s\","*.txt")
 
USER>w sc
1
USER>while rs.%Next() {w !,rs.Data("Name")}

...

then the new way is:

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Article
· Dec 22, 2016 2m read
The Polymetric Dashboard

> Customizable System Monitoring. ## Introduction The Polymetric Dashboard is a stand-alone module that provides enhanced monitoring tools for a Caché environment. Equipped with over one hundred sensors that monitor key system metrics, a robust REST API, and a modular AngularJS user interface, the Polymetric Dashboard is fully functional out of the box. However, the Polymetric Dashboard is designed to be customizable; any system metric can be monitored by creating a new sensor, and the visualization of collected data can be tailored to specific requirements and purposes.

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Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

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