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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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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Index to Articles

Published 2018-05-11 Last edit -

Hi All

I this article I detail some strategic issues that a new development UI will need to address - these are the ones that I can think of now - others may come to light during this journey.

See the webinar by Eduard Lebedyuk here from the last Global Summit describing modern web development and Caché

And, as always, if I have missed something please comment....

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Article
· Mar 31, 2018 1m read
What Are You Using For Issue Tracking?

Hi, Community!

What is your favorite issue tracking system for projects with InterSystems Data Platform? What did you use and what are you using now?

In projects with InterSystems Data Platform, I worked with Redmine, JIRA, Trello. A lot of code versioning systems now have this feature too (Gitlab, Github).

Now my favorite for small and medium projects is Github, because it is simple, is very close to code (commit-issue linkage) and it has kanban).

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Some weeks ago, I was reading a book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design. At a certain point, trying to define why do we exist? , why do we use the models we use in physics?, ...those kind of things you know... they pointed at the Game of Life example invented by the mathematician John Coward in 1970... Basically he wanted to show that a system with really basic fundamental laws (Physics) could evolve and "live" to become a more complex system (Chemistry) in which "something" (humans) could work out its own model and complex rules to explain its reality… the rules for this deterministic model that he exposed were so basic that I thought it could be funny to implement them in ObjectScript when I had some spare time... there are others implementations in JavaScript and other languages... but not in ObjectScript... and that had to be corrected!!… so here you are!

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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
  • Why containers?
  • Containers infrastructure
  • CD using containers

In the first 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.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

In the third article, we covered GitLab installation and configuration and connecting your environments to GitLab

In the fourth article, we wrote a CD configuration.

In the fifth article, we talked about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

In the sixth article let's discuss main components you'll need to run a continuous delivery pipeline with containers and how they all work together.

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery configuration discussed in the previous articles.

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Astronomers’ tools

5 years ago, on December 19, 2013, the ESA launched an orbital telescope called Gaia. Learn more about the Gaia mission on the official website of the European Space Agency or in the article by Vitaly Egorov (Billion pixels for a billion stars).

However, few people know what technology the agency chose for storing and processing the data collected by Gaia. Two years before the launch, in 2011, the developers were considering a number of candidates (see “Astrostatistics and Data Mining” by Luis Manuel Sarro, Laurent Eyer, William O’Mullane, Joris De Ridder, pp. 111-112):

Comparing the technologies side-by-side produced the following results (source):

Technology Time
DB2 13min55s
PostgreSQL 8 14min50s
PostgreSQL 9 6min50s
Hadoop 3min37s
Cassandra 3min37s
Caché 2min25s

The first four will probably sound familiar even to schoolchildren. But what is Caché XEP?

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Hi, Community!

Someday you find yourself having a wonderful class package which can be helpful in several projects. So it is a library package.

How to make the classes available for different namespaces in Caché? There are two ways (at least two ways familiar to me):

1. Start the name of the package with %, like %FantasticLib.SuperClass. Wrong way.

If you do that the class would be placed in %SYS and would be available in other namespaces.

This is wrong because of the two reasons:

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Article
· Apr 25, 2018 4m read
DNI functions

Hi everyone!

I want to share four functions with you. I hope that you can use it at some time.

DNI: the initials of the type of national identity document, is composed of different series of numbers and letters. That proves the identity and personal data of the holder, as well as the Spanish nationality. Example: 94494452X

NIE: The NIE or foreigner identity number is a code for foreigners in Spain.


In this page you can generate examples of DNI or NIE https://generadordni.es/

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I bet that not everyone familiar with InterSystems Caché knows about Studio extensions for working with the source code. You can actually use the Studio to create your own type of source code, compile it into interpretable (INT) and object code, and sometimes even add code completion support. That is, theoretically, you can make the Studio support any programming language that will be executed by the DBMS just as well as Caché ObjectScript. In this article, I will give you a simple example of writing programs in Caché Studio using a language that resembles JavaScript. If you are interested, please read along.

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Article
· Sep 13, 2018 1m read
Find a table given its name

The following code snippet includes a class method "test" that runs code to find a class based on the class's name. "test" takes one argument, which is the name of the table:


Class objectscript.findTable Extends %RegisteredObject
{
    classmethod test(name as %String="mytable")  
    {
            #Dim result as %ResultSet
            #Dim tName as %String
            #Dim contain as %Integer
     
            Set contain=0
            Set result = ##class(%ResultSet).%New("%Dictionary.ClassDefinition:Summary")
            Do result.Execute()

            While(result.Next()) 
            {
                Set tName=$get(result.Data("Name"))
                &sql(select position (:name in :tName) into :contain)
                Write:contain'=0 tName, " ... ", name, " (", contain,")", !
            }
            Return $$$OK
     }
}

Here's a link to the code on GitHub

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Sometimes, we need to copy part of the properties of an object into a different one.
The simplest thing would be to do the following:

Set obj1.FirstName = obj2.FirstName

Set obj1.SecondName = obj2.SecondName

What happens if the object contains a large number of properties? or we just want to extract an important group of data, and complement the information in another object?

Having the following classes:

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Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.

When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.

Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib

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Article
· Feb 8, 2018 1m read
Atelier security quirk

When defining a server connection in Atelier we are required to enter a username and password because these are mandatory fields in the dialog. However, if the /api/atelier web application definition on that server has only the "Unauthenticated" checkbox set in the section titled "Allowed Authentication Methods", then our Atelier connection will succeed even if we supply an invalid username and/or password.

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Article
· Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

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Article
· Mar 18, 2018 1m read
Replacing ZEN - Index to articles

Hi All
This is the index to a series of articles I hope to create over the coming months.

ZEN and ZEN Mojo are no longer being actively developed by Intesystems - this is a great shame as it is a fine product that works so well for business applications.
However ZEN is a 15 year old product and I need a path forward to replace the ZEN UI with a supported development framework.

This article is an index of the other articles I have, or plan to write. - the articles will be subject to change as I develop my thoughts and climb the learning curve.

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*** archived ***

The question has come up several times and I saw mixed answers and no quick example

My personal preference is using CPIPE device as you get back exactly the output you will get at the command line interface of your OS .
The tricky thing is to stop reading in time.
The example just displays what you normally see in your console.
it becomes useful if you look for things that you can't get from any $system.whatever()

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This post provides useful links and an overview of best practice configuration for low latency storage IO by creating LVM Physical Extent (PE) stripes for database disks on InterSystems Data Platforms; InterSystems IRIS, Caché, and Ensemble.

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What if you could serialize/deserialize objects in whatever format: JSON, XML, CSV,...; attending different criteria: export/import some properties and not others, transform values in this or that way before exporting/importing,...; and all of this without having to change the class definition? Wouldn't that be great??

Well, perhaps it's a goal too ambitious to reach 100% but, exploring this idea, I've developed a bunch of classes that I thought it was good to share. If you want to test, change, modify or improve the code, or just take a look at it, you can do it here. There you'll find a more detailed explanation (see Readme.md)

Be aware, this is a proof of concept for myself done in spare times, sure it's not robust enough or it can be done much better... but, I was just playing...ok, I could just wait to the new JSON Adaptor (coming soon!) that sure is going to resolve much more scenarios in a cleaner way, but... meanwhile... :-) ...

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