Article
· May 31, 2017 28m read
Cogs Library

Cogs Library

Over the next few months I will be releasing a number of open source libraries and tools to the Caché community.

Most of the code has evolved from previous production grade solutions over the years and I am collating it together under a single overarching library package that I am calling Cogs.

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Hello!

This article is a small overview of a tool that helps to understand classes and their structure inside the InterSystems products: from IRIS to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare.

In short, it visualizes a class or an entire package, shows the relations between classes and provides all the possible information to developers and team leads without making them go to Studio and examine the code there.

If you are learning InterSystems products, reviewing projects a lot or just interested in something new in InterSystems Technology solutions — you are more than welcome to read the overview of ObjectScript Class Explorer!

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Article
· Jul 18, 2017 2m read
Old/New Dynamic SQL Cheat Sheet

The newer dynamic SQL classes (%SQL.Statement and %StatementResult) perform better than %ResultSet, but I did not adopt them for some time because I had learned how to use %ResultSet. Finally, I made a cheat sheet, which I find useful when writing new code or rewriting old code. I thought other people might find it useful.

First, here is a somewhat more verbose adaptation of my cheat sheet:

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The DeclarativeCOS project is a heartfelt cry about programming in the COS language.

The purpose of the project is to draw attention of the public to improving the inner core of COS.

The idea of the project is the support of a laconic syntax for cycles and collections.

So what is this laconic something that I have come up with? Welcome to the examples below!

Examples

The key concept underlying the project is the declarative approach to writing code. You need to specify WHAT should be used and HOW.

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Intro

Please note, this article is considered deprecated, check out the new revision over here: https://community.intersystems.com/post/tutorial-websockets

The goal of this post is to discuss working with Websockets in a Caché environment. We are going to have a quick discussion of what websockets are and then talk through an example chat application implemented on top of Websockets.

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Article
· Dec 4, 2015 3m read
Atelier Beta Cloud Infrastructure

A few people wrote to me asking about the infrastructure behind the Atelier Server implementation. Its neat and a worthwhile story to share so I am writing it up here as a post on the community. I want to go in to a little detail on why it was needed and then I will outline in detail how we went about implementing this.

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GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

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Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

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On the back of my recent post on writing bug-less code I wanted to raise a few suggestions (to ISC) that would help prevent certain types of bugs at compile time. I've probably missed a few, but these are the main ones in my mind. Please contribute more suggestions.

Btw, these also serve as potential gotchas for new COS developers.

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So, one day you're working away at WidgetsDirect, the leading supplier of widget and widget accessories, when your boss asks you to develop the new customer facing portal to allow the client base to access the next generation of Widgets..... and he wants you to use Angular 1.x to read into the department's Caché server.

There's only one problem: You've never used Angular, and don't know how to make it talk to Caché.

This guide is going to walk through the process of setting up a full Angular stack which communicates with a Caché backend using JSON over REST.

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This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)
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In this article I would like to present the RESTForms project - generic REST API backend for modern web applications.

The idea behind the project is simple -after I wrote several REST APIs I realized that generally, REST API consists of two parts:

  • Work with persistent classes
  • Custom business logic

And, while you'll have to write your own custom business logic, RESTForms provides all things related to working with persistent classes right out of the box.
Use cases

  • You already have a data model in Caché and you want to expose some (or all) of the information in a form of REST API
  • You are developing a new Caché application and you want to provide a REST API
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Mirroring 101

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. Mirroring provides automatic failover under a broad range of planned and unplanned outage scenarios, with application recovery time typically limited to seconds. Logical data replication eliminates storage as a single point of failure and a source of data corruption. Upgrades can be executed with little or no downtime.

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Hi!

Want to share with you code snippet of try catch block I usually use in methods which should return %Status.


{ 
 try {
  	$$$TOE(sc,StatusMethod())
 }
 catch e {
 	set sc=e.AsStatus()
 	do e.Log()
 }

Quit sc 
}

Here $$$TOE is a short form of $$$TROWONERROR macro.

Inside macro StatusMethod is any method you call which will return %Status value. This value will be placed into sc variable.

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The topic of for/while loop performance in Caché ObjectScript came up in discussion recently, and I'd like to share some thoughts/best practices with the rest of the community. While this is a basic topic in itself, it's easy to overlook the performance implications of otherwise-reasonable approaches.

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NewBie's Corner Session 27 Traversing A Global with $Order Part 1

Welcome to NewBie's Corner, a weekly or biweekly post covering basic Caché Material.

Traversing A Global

Perhaps the most difficult concept in Caché/MUMPS is its Global Structure. This session and several that follow it deals with the Global Structure. However, just presenting the material will not guarantee your understanding of it. You must experiment with the data and concepts that are presented.

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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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With the release of Cache 2016.1, JSON support was re-architected and made part of the core object model with the creation of %Object and %Array classes, which allow you to create dynamic JSON enabled objects and arrays.

On a recent demonstration I was working on, I had the need to create a REST web service that returned a JSON representation of a persistent object. After searching for methods that would allow me to accomplish this, ultimately I found none, until now.

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Article
· Jul 14, 2016 1m read
Caché Haiku

Alex Koblov posted today a #CachéHaiku:

Full command names

Make your code more readable

Than compact versions

My haiku:

Caché Globals

Shows you keys to the value

If you $order it

Your variant? ;)

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InterSystems states that Caché supports at least three data models – relational, object and hierarchical (globals). On can work with data presented in relational model in a program written on C# the same way one works with any other relational DB. To work with data presented by object model in C# one needs to use .NET Managed Provider or some kind or ORM. And starting with version 2012.2 one can work directly with globals (or use direct access to hierarchical data) via Caché eXTreme for .NET.

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image

The InterSystems DBMS has a built-in technology for working with non-structured data called iKnow and a full-text search technology called iFind. We decided to take a dive into both and make something useful. As the result, we have DocSearch — a web application for searching in InterSystems documentation using iKnow and iFind.

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Article
· Mar 3, 2016 2m read
Class Projections and Projection Classes

The purpose of this post is to raise the profile of a powerful mechanism that has long been available to us, and to open a discussion about ways in which it can be used or abused.

You can read more detail about the mechanism here. To summarize, your class definition can use the Projection keyword to reference one or more projection classes. A projection class can implement methods that get invoked at key points in the lifecycle of your class.

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Article
· Feb 5, 2016 11m read
Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS

Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS (and Cache, Ensemble, HealthShare) is a useful tool that separates SQL queries from Object Script code. Basically, it works like this: suppose that you want to use the same SQL query with different arguments in several different places.In this case you can avoid code duplication by declaring the query body as a class query and then calling this query by name. This approach is also convenient for custom queries, in which the task of obtaining the next row is defined by a developer. Sounds interesting? Then read on!

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Article
· Apr 12, 2017 5m read
Bug killing development tips

Does anyone NOT use a debugger? I can't remember the last time I did. It's not because I don't dislike them, I just don't need to use them. The main reason for this is because I have a certain development methodology that either produces less bugs, catches them at a unit test level, or makes tracking them down much easier.

Here are my tips...

1. Write your own COS cheat-sheet.

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