Do not let the title of this article confuse you; we are not planning to take the InterSystems staff out to a fine Italian restaurant. Instead, this article will cover the principles of working with date and time data types in IRIS. When we use these data types, we should be aware of three different conversion issues:
Converting between internal and ODBC formats.
Converting between local time, UTC, and Posix time.
Converting to and from various date display formats.
As we keep updating our software, we often realize that we require more and more modern solutions. So far, only one major piece of our software relies on reading barcodes in documents and images. Since Cache did not have a means of reading barcodes in the past, we have always achieved our goals by using a Visual Basic 6 application. However, it is no longer an ideal solution because it is currently complicated to maintain it. IRIS also lacks this capability, but it has recently got an option that makes up for it: embedded Python!
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.
An extension “extends” or enhances a FHIR resource or a data element in a custom way. The extension can be added to the root of a resource, such as “Patient.ethnicity” in US Core profile, and they can be added to individual elements such as HumanName, Address or Identifier.
Did you know that you can also add an extension to a primitive data type?
Primitives usually store a single item and are the most basic element in FHIR. For example: "Keren", false, 1234, 12/08/2024 etc.
For example, the patient resources might look like this:
As I have been working with IRIS (nee Caché) for some time now, I decided to take a look at how I manage things like functions and scripts that may not belong to a single namespace or environment, but should still have a home.
In a development environment, we have added quite a few presentation contexts to the DICOM configurations (the associations). We would need to find a way to export them from this environment to make it easier for us to import them in PRO (and avoid doing it by hand one by one).