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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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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· May 11, 2020 5m read
Work with SAML in IRIS

When a company is quite large and many different applications used by employees. But while those applications are mostly completely different, how to make it possible to not force users to enter credentials as many times as many applications they would like to use. The best way is to use SSO, so, it will be possible to have a portal, where users could launch any application used in a company. There are many different ways how to give access to your application by using the SSO mechanism, and some of them are:

  • OAuth2
  • Kerberos
  • SAML

InterSystems already supports OAuth2 and can be quite easily deal with Kerberos. But I would like to discuss about using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

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Article
· Dec 7, 2017 3m read
Asynchronous REST

In this article I'd like to discuss asynchronous REST and approaches to implementing it.

Why do we need asynchronous REST? Simply put - answering the request takes too much time. While most requests usually can be satisfied immediately, some can't. The reasons are varied:

  • You need to perform time-consuming calculations
  • Performing action actually takes time (for example container creation)
  • etc.

The solution to these problems is asynchronous REST. Asynchronous REST works by separating request and real response. Here's an example, let's consider the following simple async REST broker:

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InterSystems' iKnow technology allows you to identify the concepts in natural language texts and the relations that link them together. As that's still a fairly abstract definition, we produced this video to explain what that means in more detail. But when meeting with customers, what really counts is a compelling demonstration, on data that makes sense to them, so they understand the value in identifying these concepts over classic top-down approaches. That's why it's probably worth spending a few articles on some of the demo apps and tools we've built to work with iKnow.

In the first article in this series, we'll start with the Knowledge Portal, a simple query interface to explore the contents of your domain.

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Hi Community!

I think everyone keeps the source code of the project in the repository nowadays: Github, GitLab, bitbucket, etc. Same for InterSystems IRIS projects check any on Open Exchange.

What do we do every time when start or continue working with a certain repository with InterSystems Data Platform?

We need a local InterSystems IRIS machine, have the environment for the project set up and the source code imported.

So every developer performs the following:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Install/Run local IRIS installation
  3. Create a new namespace/database for a project
  4. Import the code into this new namespace
  5. Setup all the rest environment
  6. Start/continue coding the project

If you dockerize your repository this steps line could be shortened to this 3 steps:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Run docker-compose build
  3. Start/continue coding the project

Profit - no any hands-on for 3-4-5 steps which could take minutes and bring head ache sometime.

You can dockerize (almost) any your InterSystems repo with a few following steps. Let’s go!

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· Sep 6, 2017 4m read
Polling an External REST API with Ensemble

Preface

Before we begin, I'd like to mention that I am by no means an Ensemble expert, so take this with a grain of salt and please feel free to offer any suggestions for improvement. That being said, I have enjoyed working with Ensemble and wanted to share the approach I took to poll an external REST API for patient data in the hopes that it might help others with a similar goal.

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Article
· May 26, 2016 1m read
Windows, Caché and virus scanners

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

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This article will describe processes for running unit tests via the InterSystems Package Manager (aka IPM - see https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/InterSystems-Package-Manager-1), including test coverage measurement (via https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/Test-Coverage-Tool).

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· Aug 31, 2023 5m read
PDF Compression Using Ghostscript

Introduction.

Have you ever felt like your PDF files take up too much space on your server? As you collect more and more of these files, you might run into storage issues that can be costly to solve. But what if there was a way to shrink the size of these PDFs by 50% to 70% without compromising the document's visual clarity.

Today, we're going to explore a solution for this problem that I really like: GhostScript.

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Article
· Mar 4, 2016 1m read
Getting my head around a class model

There's plenty of goodness in the %-packages InterSystems supplies, and it seems that every new version of Caché brings something new. The browser-based class documentation (a.k.a. Documatic) generally provides a good level of information, but on the basis that "a picture is worth a thousand words" I sometimes want a diagram.

For example, when trying to navigate the %Dictionary package for a project that needed to find out about class definitions, here's one of the UML class diagrams I created.

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Article
· Jun 12, 2017 1m read
Setting the Windows service account

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

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Whether you are accessing DeepSee for the first time ever or you are configuring DeepSee on a new instance, there are two common issues that are encountered after clicking on the “DeepSee” option in the System Management Portal.

Issue #1: Architect/Analyzer is grayed out!

Issue #2: DeepSee must be enabled before use.

Issue #1: Architect/Analyzer is grayed out!

There are two common causes for this problem.

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Introduction

InterSystems has recently completed a performance and scalability benchmark of IRIS for Health 2020.1, focusing on HL7 version 2 interoperability. This article describes the observed throughput for various workloads, and also provides general configuration and sizing guidelines for systems where IRIS for Health is used as an interoperability engine for HL7v2 messaging.

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Preface: our small, but very ambitious company called “Black Mushroom Studio” came up with an idea for an e-commerce project and a mobile app that would let users pay for certain goods/services via a payment aggregator.

What we had initially: an Android app skeleton that, of course, liked communicating via HTTP and JSON, and a payment system with an API – web services with SOAP content.

Goal: make it all work together.

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Last week, we announced the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, our new and comprehensive platform for all your data endeavours, whether transactional, analytics or both. We've included many of the features our customers know and loved from Caché and Ensemble, but in this article we'll shed a little more light on one of the new capabilities of the platform: SQL Sharding, a powerful new feature in our scalability story.

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Article
· Aug 2, 2022 8m read
Data models in InterSystems IRIS

Before we start talking about databases and different data models that exist, first we'd better talk about what a database is and how to use it.

A database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. It is used to store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, or raw data which is often related to a theme or activity.

At the heart of every database lies at least one model used to describe its data. And depending on the model it is based on, a database may have slightly different characteristics and store different types of data.

To write, retrieve, modify, sort, transform or print the information from the database, a software called Database Management System (DBMS) is used.

The size, capacity, and performance of databases and their respective DBMS have increased by several orders of magnitude. It has been made possible by technological advances in various areas, such as processors, computer memory, computer storage, and computer networks. In general, the development of database technology can be divided into four generations based on the data models or structure: navigational, relational, object and post-relational.

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