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#Best Practices

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Best Practices recommendations on how to develop, test, deploy and manage solutions on InterSystems Data Platforms better. 

Have you ever been editing files in VS Code, but needed to check a global value or run a few ObjectScript commands? Now you can, with no setup required! If you have vscode-objectscript extension version 2.10.0 or later and are connected to InterSystems IRIS 2023.2 or later, you can now open a terminal connection to your server, regardless of where it's located.

There are three ways to open this new terminal:

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Article
· Sep 13, 2022 8m read
CI/CD with IRIS SQL

In the vast and varied SQL database market, InterSystems IRIS stands out as a platform that goes way beyond just SQL, offering a seamless multimodel experience and supporting a rich set of development paradigms. Especially the advanced Object-Relational engine has helped organizations use the best-fit development approach for each facet of their data-intensive workloads, for example ingesting data through Objects and simultaneously querying it through SQL. Persistent Classes correspond to SQL tables, their properties to table columns and business logic is easily accessed using User-Defined Functions or Stored Procedures. In this article, we'll zoom in on a little bit of the magic just below the surface, and discuss how it may affect your development and deployment practices. This is an area of the product where we have plans to evolve and improve, so please don't hesitate to share your views and experiences using the comments section below.

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Article
· Mar 31, 2023 3m read
Using JSON in IRIS

Saw the other day an article with the usage of the %ZEN package when working with JSON and decided to write an article describing a more modern approach. At some recent point, there was a big switch from using %ZEN.Auxiliary.* to dedicated JSON classes. This allowed to work with JSONs more organically.

Thus, at this point there are basically 3 main classes to work with JSON:

  • %Library.DynamicObject - provides a simple and efficient way to encapsulate and work with standard JSON documents. Also, there is a possibility instead of writing the usual code for creating an instance of a class like
set obj = ##class(%Library.DynamicObject).%New()

it is possible to use the following syntax

set obj = {}
  • %Library.DynamicArray - provides a simple yet efficient way to encapsulate and work with standard JSON arrays. With arrays you can use the same approach as with objects, meaning that yu can either create an instance of the class
set array = ##class(%DynamicArray).%New()

or you can do it by using brackets []

set array = []
  • %JSON.Adaptor is a means for mapping ObjectScript objects (registered, serial or persistent) to JSON text or dynamic entities.
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Adding VSCode into your IRIS container

One of the easiest ways to setup repeatable development environments is to spin up containers for them. I find that when iterating quickly, it was very convenient to host a vscode instance within my development container. Thus, I have created a quick container script to add a browser-based vscode into an IRIS container. This should work for most 2021.1+ containers. My code repository can be found here

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Hi Developers!

"objectscript.conn" :{
      "ns": "IRISAPP",
      "active": true,
      "docker-compose": {
        "service": "iris",
        "internalPort": 52773
      }

I want to share with you a nice new feature I came across in a new 0.8 release of VSCode ObjectScript plugin by @Dmitry Maslennikov and CaretDev.

The release comes with a new configuration setting "docker-compose" which solves the issue with ports you need to set up to make your VSCode Editor connect to IRIS. It was not very convenient if you had more than one docker container with IRIS running on the same machine. Now, this is solved!

Read below how it works now.

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Say I've been developing a web application that uses IRIS as the back end. I've been working on it with unauthenticated access. It's getting to the point where I would like to deploy it to users, but first I need to add authentication. Rather than using the default IRIS password authentication, I'd like users to sign in with my organization's Single Sign On, or some other popular identity provider like Google or GitHub. I've read that OpenID Connect is a common authentication standard, and it's supported by IRIS. What is the simplest way to get up and running?

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Article
· Aug 16, 2023 11m read
Http request response time monitoring

Hi developers!

Today I would like to address a subject that has given me a hard time. I am sure this must have been the case for quite a number of you already (so-called “the bottleneck”). Since this is a broad topic, this article will only focus on identifying incoming HTTP requests that could be causing slowness issues. I will also provide you with a small tool I have developed to help identify them.

Our software is becoming more and more complex, processing a large number of requests from different sources, be it front-end or third-party back-end applications. To ensure optimal performance, it is essential to have a logging system capable of taking a few key measurements, such as the response time, the number of global references and the number of lines of code executed for each HTTP response. As part of my work, I get involved in the development of EMR software as well as incident analysis. Since user load comes mostly from HTTP requests (REST API or CSP application), the need to have this type of measurement when generalized slowness issues occur has become obvious.

Open Exchange app
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Article
· Jun 19, 2020 5m read
Migrate from Java Business Host to PEX

Migrate from Java Business Host to PEX

With the release PEX in InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2020.1, customers have a better way to build Java into productions than the Java Business Host. PEX provides a complete set of APIs for building interoperability components and is available in both Java and .NET. The Java Business Host has been deprecated and will be retired in a future release.

Advantages of PEX

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Overview

We often run into connectivity problems with HealthShare (HS) deployments in Microsoft Azure that have multiple HealthShare components (instances or namespaces) installed on the same VM, especially when needing to communicate to other HS components while using the Azure Load Balancer (ILB) to provide mirror VIP functionality. Details on how and why a load balancer is used with database mirroring can be found this community article.

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InterSystems SAM is a great tool to monitor your InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS For Health clusters on prem or in a cloud environment. This article describes how you can implement a customized alert handler. This is currently an undocumented and most likely an unknown feature of InterSystems SAM. With future releases it will be probably made easier to leverage this useful concept.

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Article
· Nov 26, 2019 3m read
Designing valid hierarchies in DeepSee

When designing a hierarchy in DeepSee, a child member must have only one parent member. In the case where a child corresponds to two parents, the results can become unreliable. In the case where two similar members exist, their keys must be changed so that they are unique. We will take a look at two examples to see when this happens and how to prevent it.

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Let me introduce my new project, which is irissqlcli, REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) for InterSystems IRIS SQL

  • Syntax Highlighting
  • Suggestions (tables, functions)
  • 20+ output formats
  • stdin support
  • Output to files

Install it with pip

pip install irissqlcli

Or run with docker

docker run -it caretdev/irissqlcli irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM:SYS@host.docker.internal:1972/USER

Connect to IRIS

$ irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM@localhost:1972/USER -W
Password for _SYSTEM:
Server:  InterSystems IRIS Version 2022.3.0.606 xDBC Protocol Version 65
Version: 0.1.0
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> select $ZVERSION
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Expression_1                                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for ARM64 Containers) 2022.3 (Build 606U) Mon Jan 30 2023 09:05:12 EST |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set
Time: 0.063s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> help
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Command  | Shortcut          | Description                                                |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| .exit    | \q                | Exit.                                                      |
| .mode    | \T                | Change the table format used to output results.            |
| .once    | \o [-o] filename  | Append next result to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
| .schemas | \ds               | List schemas.                                              |
| .tables  | \dt [schema]      | List tables.                                               |
| \e       | \e                | Edit command with editor (uses $EDITOR).                   |
| help     | \?                | Show this help.                                            |
| nopager  | \n                | Disable pager, print to stdout.                            |
| notee    | notee             | Stop writing results to an output file.                    |
| pager    | \P [command]      | Set PAGER. Print the query results via PAGER.              |
| prompt   | \R                | Change prompt format.                                      |
| quit     | \q                | Quit.                                                      |
| tee      | tee [-o] filename | Append all results to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
Time: 0.012s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER>

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We are ridiculously good at mastering data. The data is clean, multi-sourced, related and we only publish it with resulting levels of decay that guarantee the data is current. We chose the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) to land the data, and enable exchange of the data through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®).

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This article contains the tutorial document for a Global Summit academy session on Text Categorization and provides a helpful starting point to learn about Text Categorization and how iKnow can help you to implement Text Categorization models. This document was originally prepared by Kerry Kirkham and Max Vershinin and should work based on the sample data provided in the SAMPLES namespace.

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Overview

We started to use Azure Service Bus (ASB) as an enterprise messaging solution 3 years ago. It is being used to publish and consume data between many applications in the organization. Since the data flow is complex, and one application’s data is usually needed in multi applications the “publisher” ---> ”multiple subscribers” model was a great fit. The ASB usage in the organization is dozens of millions of messages per day, while IRIS platform is having around 2-3 million messages/day.

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Article
· May 21, 2018 10m read
Adding your own provider to MFT

Managed File Transfer (MFT) feature of InterSystems IRIS enables easy inclusion of a third-party file transfer service directly into an InterSystems IRIS production. Currently, DropBox, Box, and Kiteworks cloud disks are available.

In this article, I'd like to describe how to add more cloud storage platforms.

Here's what we're going to talk about:

  • What is MFT
  • Reference: Dropbox
    • Connection
    • Interoperability
    • Direct access
  • Interfaces you need to implement
    • Connection
    • Logic
  • Installation
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This formation, accessible on my GitHub, will cover, in half a hour, how to read and write in csv and txt files, insert and get inside the IRIS database and a distant database using Postgres or how to use a FLASK API, all of that using the Interoperability framework using ONLY Python following the PEP8 convention.

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Article
· Jun 13, 2016 1m read
Debug: using locks for breakpoints

Hi, Community!

Want to share with you one debugging approach from the Russian forum.

Suppose I want to debug the application and I want it to stop the execution on a particular line.

I add in code this line:

l +d,-d

When I want to start debugging in this line I block d in terminal

USER> l +d

And execute the app.

The app stops on this line and lets me connect to it with Studio debugger.

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Article
· May 25, 2023 12m read
AWS Capacity planning review example

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;
- Compute requirements.
- Storage requirements.

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Article
· Jan 2, 2022 3m read
DB Migration using SQLgateway

Thanks to @Yuri Marx we have seen a very nice example for DB migration from Postgres to IRIS.
My personal problem is the use of DBeaver as a migration tool.
Especially as one of the strengths of IRIS ( and also Caché) before is the availability of the
SQLgateways that allow access to any external Db as long as for them an access usinig
JDBC or ODBC is available. So I extended the package to demonstrate this.

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This article is a continuation of Deploying InterSystems IRIS solution on GKE Using GitHub Actions, in which, with the help of GitHub Actions pipeline, our zpm-registry was deployed in a Google Kubernetes cluster created by Terraform. In order not to repeat, we’ll take as a starting point that:

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I needed to know programmatically if last ran failed or not.

After some exploring, here's the code:

ClassMethod isLastTestOk() As %Boolean
{
  set in = ##class(%UnitTest.Result.TestInstance).%OpenId(^UnitTest.Result)
  for i=1:1:in.TestSuites.Count() {
    #dim suite As %UnitTest.Result.TestSuite
    set suite = in.TestSuites.GetAt(i)
    return:suite.Status=0 $$$NO
  }
  quit $$$YES
}

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