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#Beginner

10

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

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.

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Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab WorkFlow
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

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Article
· Feb 26, 2018 2m read
M:N Relationship

If you have worked with Caché Objects,
You know already all about Relationships (one:many , parent:child) ...
But you will not find a word on many:many relationships in the docs.

But I met the question quite often from new adopters of Caché objects:
"Is it possible to implement many:many relationships ?" YES - of course !

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InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

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Hi folks!

Recently I was in need to setup a local FHIR server using IRIS For Health and I think I found the easiest and simplest way ever.

Just run in terminal these two lines below :

docker run --rm --name my-iris -d --publish 9091:1972 --publish 9092:52773 intersystemsdc/irishealth-community

and

docker exec -it my-iris iris session iris -U "USER" '##class(%ZPM.PackageManager).Shell("install fhir-server")'

And you'll have FHIR server running locally at http://localhost:9092/fhir/r4.

That's it!

The FHIR server will use the latest build of InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition and will deploy FHIR server from this app via IPM package in FHIRSERVER namespace.

This is for Mac, so please add in comments how it works in Windows.

This is a very short article as it is really easy to setup a local FHIR server with InterSystems IRIS for Health and IPM Package Manager.

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Hi developer folks!

Thanks to all of you who start the development with InterSystems IRIS from the basic development template!

Recently, thanks to @Dmitry Maslennikov's contributions I've updated the Dockerfile to make the development simpler, images lighter and the building process faster. And it looks more beautiful too ;)

Here is what changed:

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Article
· Apr 21, 2021 1m read
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V in IRIS Terminal

It's possible to enable Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V in IRIS Terminal for Windows.

To do that, open Terminal and select Edit > User Settings and enable Windows edit accelerators. This setting specifies whether the Terminal enables the common Windows edit shortcuts (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V), in addition to the basic Terminal edit shortcuts (Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert).

After that Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V would work.

Also <SYNTAX> errors after incorrect copy/paste go away.

Docs.

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Article
· Feb 15, 2021 17m read
Four Database APIs

A concurrent session in IRIS:
SQL, Objects, REST, and GraphQL

Kazimir Malevich, "Athletes" (1932)

"But of course you don't understand! How can a person who has always traveled in a horse-drawn carriage understand the feelings and impressions of the express traveler or the pilot in the air?"

Kazimir Malevich (1916)

Introduction

We’ve already addressed the topic of why object/type representation is superior to SQL for implementing subject area models. And those conclusions and facts are as true now as they have ever been. So why should we take a step back and discuss technologies that drag abstractions back to the global level, where they had been in the pre-object and pre-type era? Why should we encourage the use of spaghetti code, which results in bugs that are hard to track down, and which relies only on virtuoso developer skills?

There are several arguments in favor of transmitting data via SQL/REST/GraphQL-based APIs as opposed to representing them as types/objects:

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Article
· Oct 18, 2016 7m read
Macros in the InterSystems Caché

In this article I would like to tell you about macros in InterSystems Caché. A macro is a symbolic name that is replaced with a set of instructions during compilation. A macro can “unfold” in various instruction sets each time it is called, depending on the parameters passed to it and activated scenarios. This can be both static code and the result of ObjectScript execution. Let's take a look at how you can use them in your application.

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Article
· Jul 28, 2022 1m read
Approach to InterSystems IRIS

Hi Folks,

Before I begin my writing journey here I wish to introduce myself briefly, so that everyone who reads and follows me will get a clear picture.

To start with I did my Bachelors in Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science were my core subjects. I have 4+ years of experience in HealthCare Revenue Cycle operations including Medical Coding, Billing, AR Collections, Denial Management and Fincial Reconciliation. Also, 2+ years of experience in Data Operations and Analytics, specifically in Python, PowerBI, SQL and MsExcel.

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The title of the contest subject is not quite precise but addresses the %Library.classes involved.
What is meant is officially named Class Query and is dating back to the early days of Caché.
CLASS is used because it is embedded in a COS class.
Though there is a precise description in the official documentation it remains rather abstract.
My tutorial should guide you step-by-step through a simple example in COS to make it tangible to you

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My previous article introduced you to SQL based Basic Class Query
where a clever wizard created all the required code for you and your essential
contribution was an SQL statement.

Now we enter the real Custom Class Query that provides more freedom but
requires a deeper understanding of the mechanic behind the scene.
The full code example is again on GitHub

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The last time that I created a playground for experimenting with machine learning using Apache Spark and an InterSystems data platform, see Machine Learning with Spark and Caché, I installed and configured everything directly on my laptop: Caché, Python, Apache Spark, Java, some Hadoop libraries, to name a few. It required some effort, but eventually it worked.

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In this article, I would show how you can upload and download files from InterSystems products via http.

The questions about working with files over http arise fairly often on community and I'm usually linking to my FileServer project which demonstrates file upload/download but I'd like to talk a bit more on how we can serve and receive files from InterSystems products.

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Contestant

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.

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Article
· Feb 13 7m read
My first experience in using IAM

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).

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

  • GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
  • Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

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InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

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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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In this article, we will run an InterSystems IRIS cluster using docker and Merge CPF files - a new feature allowing you to configure servers with ease.

On UNIX® and Linux, you can modify the default iris.cpf using a declarative CPF merge file. A merge file is a partial CPF that sets the desired values for any number of parameters upon instance startup. The CPF merge operation works only once for each instance.

Our cluster architecture is very simple, it would consist of one Node1 (master node) and two Data Nodes (check all available roles). Unfortunately, docker-compose cannot deploy to several servers (although it can deploy to remote hosts), so this is useful for local development of sharding-aware data models, tests, and such. For a productive InterSystems IRIS Cluster deployment, you should use either ICM or IKO.

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