While starting with Intersystems IRIS or Cache, developers often encounter three core concepts: Dynamic Objects, Globals & Relational Table. Each has its role in building scalable and maintainable solutions. In this article, we'll walk through practical code examples, highlight best practices, and show how these concepts tie together.

1. Working with Dynamic Objects:

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Hi ,

I am creating a report on Trakcare with the help of Jreport. But the date parameter from trakcare is not reading on Jreport and the report is blank.

If I hardcode the date on Jreport,it is displaying on Trakcare but not taking report from Trakcare.

Parameter used on report manager on Trakcare is $g(%request.Data("DateFrom",1)).

Can anyone please tell me any change of settings on Trakcare or Jreport will help to work ?

Thanks for the help

Jude

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If you thought native Go support for IRIS was exciting, wait until you see what happens when GORM enters the mix.

Just recently, we welcomed native GoLang support for InterSystems IRIS with the release of go-irisnative. That was just the beginning. Now, we’re kicking things up a notch with the launch of gorm-iris — a GORM driver designed to bring the power of Object Relational Mapping (ORM) to your IRIS + Go stack.

Why GORM?

GORM is one of the most popular ORM libraries in the Go ecosystem. It makes it easy to interact with databases using Go structs instead of writing raw SQL. With features like auto migrations, associations, and query building, GORM simplifies backend development significantly.

So naturally, the next step after enabling Go to talk natively with IRIS was to make GORM work seamlessly with it. That’s exactly what gorm-iris does.

Open Exchange app
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Question
· Jun 19, 2025
Namespace vs database

I'm confused about the differences between a namespace and a database.

I understand that a database is a single IRIS.DATA file in a directory in the os hosting IRIS.

What is the difference between a namespace and a database?

Can I write data into a database without specifying a namespace?
If so how do I write to a particlar DB in objectscript?

Does a database have to be in a namespace?
Can a database be in more than one namespace?

Can a namespace have only one 'routine' database and only one 'data' database?

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What We’re Looking For:
3+ years of experience with InterSystems IRIS, Caché, or Ensemble
Strong skills in ObjectScript, SQL, and scripting languages (Python/Java a plus)
Experience with healthcare interoperability (HL7, FHIR, X12)
Cloud knowledge is a bonus (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
Curious mind + collaborative spirit + bias for action

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Hi fellow developers!

Curious if you guys use CreatedAt and LastUpdated properties in your classes?

Created to stamp when the record was created and LastUpdated when it was last updated. Where it can be useful - almost everywhere )) I find it convenient in records sorting (e.g. by creation or last update), in sync (with other systems), and so on, for better analytics.

Do you use it all the time for all the classes?

If don't, why not? What do you use instead?

What property type do you use - %TimeStamp? %DateTime?

What is the best practice to have CreatedAt filled automatically during creation and LastUpdated on every successful save (guess it could be in %OnSave)?

Please share your experience /thoughts?

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Let's suppose two different routines use one and the same chunk of code. From the object-oriented POV, a good decision is to have this chunk of code in a separate class and have both routines call it. However, whenever you call code outside of the routine as opposed to calling code in the same routine, some execution speed is lost. For reports churning through millions of transactions this lost speed might be noticeable. Any advice how to optimize specifically speed?

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This article shares analysis in solution cycle for the Open Exchange application TOOT ( Open Exchange application )

The hypothesis

A button on a web page can capture the users voice. IRIS integration could manipulate the recordings to extract semantic meaning that IRIS vector search can then offer for new types of AI solution opportunity.

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Hello,

Our software commonly returns a full result set to the client and we use the DataTables plugin to display table data. This has worked well, but at datasets grow larger, we are trying to move some of these requests server-side so the server handles the bulk of the work rather than the client. This has had me scratching my head in so many ways.

I'm hoping I can get a mix of general best practice advice but also maybe some IRIS specific ideas.

Some background

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I have VS Code with extensions connected to IRIS for Health. One top-level ObjectScript package is not displayed in the workspace for this namespace. This package exists in the namespace and is visible in SMP. If I create a new class with a different top-level package name (package that didn't previously exist) it will immediately appear in the workspace.

Is there any debug logging I can enable to look for errors or do any other troubleshooting?

Forgot to mention: the missing package is custom, not a system package.

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Hey everyone,

I'm diving deeper into Caché ObjectScript and would love to open a discussion around the most useful tips, tricks, and best practices you’ve learned or discovered while working with it.

Whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started, ObjectScript has its own set of quirks and powerful features—some well-documented, others hidden gems. I’m looking to compile a helpful set of ideas from the community.

Some areas I’m especially interested in:

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Hi, I am unsure how to remove this restriction; when I am performing dynamic SQL using ##class(%SQL.Statement).%ExecDirectNoPriv(, .query, args...)

It works fine, but the moment I add specific properties from the persistent class I am performing the select on into the WHERE clause, I get: ERROR #5540: SQLCODE: -99 Message: User UnknownUser is not privileged for the operation. Despite using %ExecDirectNoPriv, I've tried with prepared statement as well, exact same situation.

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I'm exploring this right now: given a bunch of types defined as Pydantic models, how can I come up with an equivalent %RegisteredObject/%SerialObject and convert to/from (e.g., to support persistence and match validation as much as possible)?

People who know Python better than I do (e.g., your average undergraduate from this decade): is this a stupid idea or a cool idea? Has anyone else done this before?

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If you want to know if a class about a topic already exists asking a simple natural language question, it is possible now. Download and run the application https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/langchain-iris-tool to know all about your project classes in a Chat.

Open Exchange app
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Visual Studio Code releases new updates every month with new features and bug fixes, and the February 2025 release is now available.

There have been enhancements to GitHub Copilot with predictive editing, autonomous task completion, smarter code search, improved terminal and notebook support, and UI and workflow refinements.

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What are best practices for JSON transformation in IRIS interoperability? This is for a non-healthcare use case, so any tools we happen to have around FHIR might not be available. The motivating use case is trimming down a verbose and needlessly complex REST API response to feed to an LLM - trying to reduce token usage and maybe get better results from less noisy data.

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Been testing out the Production Validator toolkit, just to see what we can/not do with it. Seems really interesting and there seem to be some use cases for it that can really streamline some upgrades (or at least parts of upgrades) but I was running into so many hurdles with the documentation. I am curious if anyone else has used it.

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Here are the technology bonuses for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025 that will give you extra points in the voting:

  • Developer Experience Idea implemented - 4
  • IRIS Vector Search usage -3
  • Embedded Python usage -3
  • InterSystems Interoperability - 3
  • InterSystems IRIS BI - 3
  • VSCode Plugin - 3
  • FHIR Tools - 3
  • Docker container usage -2
  • ZPM Package Deployment - 2
  • Online Demo -2
  • Find and report a bug - 2
  • Article on Developer Community - 2
  • The second article on Developer Community - 1
  • Video on YouTube - 3
  • YouTube Short - 1
  • First Time Contribution - 3

See the details below.<--break->

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