#Beginner

6 Followers · 530 Posts

Beginner tag unites articles and questions for those who are getting started with InterSystems Data Platform

Article Maria Gladkov · Mar 15, 2023 3m read

Hi all!

In this article I would like to review those VS Code extensions which I use myself to work with InterSystems and which make my work much more convenient. I am sure this article will be useful for those who are just starting their journey to learn InterSystems technologies. However, I also hope that this article could be useful for experienced developers with many years of experience and open up new possibilities for them when using VS Code for development.

10
7 3078
Question Ronald Hauser · Jan 24, 2025

I am a volunteer at a nonprofit that is attempting to connect to a product that uses InterSystems Cache (Clinisys LIMS). I have not used this database before, but I have used many others (MS-SQL, Oracle, etc.). I am hoping IRIS is compatible enough with Cache for this project. 

I downloaded IRIS. I learned about Terminal [IRIS]. Using it I was able to create a new table, insert data, and retrieve it. I also used the Management Portal to query the new table. It also returned the data.

Next I attempted to connect with Visual Studio (MS VS 2022 Profesional). I downloaded the InterSystems.Data.

4
0 422
Article Jimmy Xu · Feb 13, 2023 7m read

Experience & feedback from online course Hands-On with InterSystems API Manager for Developers

With my basic knowledge of Docker container and REST API, I would like to have my first try on using InterSystems API manager to take control of APIs and microservices. I have completed this online course using my local IRIS instance as host (Windows OS) and IAM running on a Linux VM (guest). 

Firstly, I will introduce InterSystems API Manager (IAM), then explain the steps for setting up my local environment and lastly walk through the course chapters.

5
3 873
Article Brad Nissenbaum · Apr 3, 2024 3m read

How to create an ODBC connection on your native Windows laptop to IRIS running on a Windows VM on the same computer, test the connection, and pull data from IRIS into Excel.

Recently I learned that Excel can connect to external databases via ODBC. This includes basically any ODBC data source. Since IRIS speaks ODBC via the ODBC API, we can take advantage of the InterSystems ODBC Driver to establish an ODBC connection to IRIS on Windows that Excel can utilize.

2
2 1026
Article David Hockenbroch · Oct 14, 2024 9m read

Many programming languages use the try-and-catch construct to handle runtime errors gracefully. If the code within the try block encounters an error, it will throw an exception to the catch block, where the error handling occurs. Today we will dive into the ObjectScript implementation of this construct and discuss some ways to clean things up.

1
3 493
Question Anthony Master · Jun 4, 2024

When developing productions there are many places that we input endpoint information (IP/port) especially when there are dozens of operations going to the same environment. What later happens is that the IP changes and we have to then go into each operation and update the IP.

Is there a way to create a "global variable" for an endpoint, something like `$ehr_IP` and then use that and update it in a single place?
I'm aware of defaults, but I don't want a default as this is not a "default" but is the value to use in place of the variable.

6
0 474
Article Vic Sun · Feb 28, 2024 27m read

What is Journaling?

Journaling is a critical IRIS feature and a part of what makes IRIS a reliable database. While journaling is fundamental to IRIS, there are nuances, so I wrote this article to summarize (more briefly than our documentation which has all the details) what you need to know. I realize the irony of saying the 27 minute read is brief.

Every modification to a journaled database (sets and kills) is recorded with its timestamp in a journal file. This runs in parallel with writes to the databases and the write image journal (WIJ) for redundancy.

3
9 1737
Article Evgeny Shvarov · Sep 19, 2019 6m read

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>
16
6 2136
Question Eduard Lebedyuk · Jan 15, 2020

I need to know if given package exists or not.

Currently found two solution - one doesn't work, another works but I don't like it.

Solution 1.

I started, of course, with %Dictionary package - it has PackageDefinition class after all.

However, %ExistsId returned 0 on packages that clearly do exist, so I went to %LoadData, it uses this macro to determine if the package exist:

#define PACKAGE(%package)             ^oddPKG($zcvt(%package,"u"))

And zw ^oddPKG showed the root cause - ^oddPKG global only contains data for packages with tables (or something along these lines).

Solution 2.

12
0 647
Question Kari Vatjus-Anttila · Oct 31, 2016

Hi,

I'm new with writing Caché Objectscript so I need some assistance. I have XML which contains information like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<session>
   <sessionId>124364</sessionId>
   <cabinet>demo</cabinet>
   <eventType>IN</eventType>
   <eventTime>20161006160154</eventTime>
   <login>test</login>
   <loginFirstName>test</loginFirstName>
   <loginLastName>test</loginLastName>
</session>

I have a class representing this object as follows:

 Class Testing.Messages.Session (
5
0 1616
Question Aman · Jul 2, 2024

Hello Community,

I'm a beginner and currently working on a project to convert CCDA files to FHIR using InterSystems IRIS. I have developed a web form to upload CCDA files, and I'm attempting to convert the uploaded CCDA files to FHIR. However, I am encountering an issue where the conversion process results in an empty entry.
Here's the Output it displays on HTML page:

Size of CCDA Stream: 741524

Here is my code: CCDtoFHIR.csp

htmllang<</<br<brul

Problem Description:

9
0 260
Article Evgeny Shvarov · Jul 30, 2019 2m read

Hi Developers!

This is the second post on the resources for Developers. This part is about Open Exchange

Using Open Exchange to Learn InterSystems

InterSystems Open Exchange is a applications gallery of tools, connectors, and libraries which InterSystems Developers submit to share the experience, approaches and do business. All the applications are either built with InterSystems data platforms or are intended to use for development with InterSystems data platforms.

If you are a beginner developer you can take a look at applications in Technology Example category. All the applications in this category come with open source code repositories, so you are able to run the samples and examples in a docker container with IRIS on your laptop or in the cloud IRIS sandbox. Examples:

4
0 480
Article Evgeny Shvarov · Jul 28, 2019 2m read

Hi Developers!

Recently I was asked, “How can a beginner in InterSystems technologies learn from InterSystems Developers community content to improve his developer skills”?

This is a really good question. It has several answers so I decided to write the post with the hope it could be useful for developers.

So! How to learn Intersystems Data Platforms(IRIS, IRIS for Health) from InterSystems Developers community content if you are a beginner?

2
0 656
Announcement Kristina Lauer · May 21, 2024

Develop in InterSystems IRIS, Implement InterSystems IRIS


Are you new to coding in InterSystems IRIS® data platform?

👩‍💻 Learn how to start developing an app in InterSystems ObjectScript alongside your language of choice (program, 20h).

🥇 Earn a digital badge by demonstrating your skills in the final assessment!

Need to learn how to implement InterSystems IRIS?

👨‍💻 Get familiar with InterSystems IRIS integration and programming (program, 26h). Digital badges are available for some learning paths within this program.

0
1 300
Question Stephane Devin · Apr 10, 2024

Hi,

I am using embeded python to utilize some pythonic library but i got a problem on my hand.
One of the python function i am using return multiple values

in python you would do something like that :

val1, val2, val3, = function(params)

In COS I got something like that :

lib = ##class(%SYS.Python).Import("lib")
val1 = lib.function(params)

And I don't know how to get the second and third values.
Is there a way to get them?

5
1 324