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.

19 11
5 6.6K

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.

16 23
3 4.7K
Article
· Oct 7, 2016 4m read
Forwarding Requests in a REST Service

One useful feature of our REST framework is the ability for a dispatch class to identify request prefixes and forward them to another dispatch class. This approach of modularizing your URL map will improve code readability, enable you to easily maintain separate versions of an interface, and provide a means to protect API calls that only certain users will be allowed to access.

7 1
0 3.6K
Article
· Apr 17, 2017 4m read
Debugging Web

In this article I'll cover testing and debugging Caché web applications (mainly REST) with external tools. Second part covers Caché tools.

You wrote server-side code and want to test it from a client or already have a web application and it doesn't work. Here comes debugging. In this article I'll go from the easiest to use tools (browser) to the most comprehensive (packet analyzer), but first let's talk a little about most common errors and how they can be resolved.

16 2
5 3.3K

In the WRC, we frequently see customers contact us because their Web Gateway is unable to serve web pages. This article will explain a frequent reason why these errors can occur, and explain some tools which can be used to debug the problem. This explanation is focused on the Web Gateway serving InterSystems IRIS instances, but the same explanation should apply to the CSP Gateway serving Caché instances as well.

5 0
1 2K

We finished our last lesson with our Widgets Direct page iterating over a list of widgets, displaying an ID and a Name value. While we have been able to achieve this with only a small amount of coding, the page itself is not the most visually appealing place to be. The AngularJS framework is providing a powerful Model-View-Controller framework for our structure and logic, but it does not implement anything that will provide a nice UI experience.

6 3
0 1.6K

or "Didn't you say you would cover Persistent Objects in Part 5, Chris?"

Yes, that was the plan. This is a pretty important topic, so it get's its own Article

Up until now, we've display widget JSON that has been created by a basic loop. Clearly this isn't of much value. Now we have our stack connected together, and we can see that the data is flowing to the Welcome page, it's time to complete the stack and start feeding our service from "real" data.

2 4
0 1.5K

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....

13 13
2 1.4K
Article
· Dec 12, 2016 3m read
Generate and Validate Captcha Code

Suppose you have developed your own web app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform a captcha validation on the client side in order to determine whether or not the user is human and make it safer. There are some modern frameworks to address the captcha issue, however most part of them needs internet access to generate codes and sometimes are complex to implement. Take this as basic example considering that image recognition has gotten too good. That's why you nowadays you tend to see more pattern recognition captchas than mere reading ones. (I.e.

7 9
2 1.4K

Sometimes you can face the situation when you did update the web app on Caché server but you cannot get the newest version of the app in a browser.

Here are couple recipes which help me to solve it. From simplest to more sophisticated and not obvious.

1. Refresh page in a browser

In Chrome it is Ctrl+R or 'Refresh' button. Obvious, but helpful.

2. Hard reset in a browser

If you are in Chrome, open Developer tools

2 1
0 1.4K

Here is an ObjectScript snippet which lets to create database, namespace and a web application for InterSystems IRIS:

    set currentNS = $namespace

    zn "%SYS"

    write "Create DB ...",!
    set dbName="testDB"
    set dbProperties("Directory") = "/InterSystems/IRIS/mgr/testDB"
    set status=##Class(Config.Databases).Create(dbName,.dbProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "DB """_dbName_""" was created!",!!


    write "Create namespace ...",!
    set nsName="testNS"
    //DB for globals
    set nsProperties("Globals") = dbName
    //DB for routines
    set nsProperties("Routines") = dbName
    set status=##Class(Config.Namespaces).Create(nsName,.nsProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "Namespace """_nsName_""" was created!",!!


    write "Create web application ...",!
    set webName = "/csp/testApplication"
    set webProperties("NameSpace") = nsName
    set webProperties("Enabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("IsNameSpaceDefault") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("CSPZENEnabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("DeepSeeEnabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("AutheEnabled") = $$$AutheCache
    set status = ##class(Security.Applications).Create(webName, .webProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "Web application """webName""" was created!",!

    zn currentNS

5 3
5 1.4K

or "Things are going to break"

We left our application over the weekend, secure in the knowledge that it was returning data from our primary persistent class, User.Widget. However, Widgets Direct are the premier supplier of both Widgets AND Widget Accessories, so we should really start working on adding these Accessories to our application.

2 3
0 1.3K

At the end of our last lesson, we ended with our page displaying a nice (but garish) Angular Material Toolbar, and our Widget data displaying in a list of Material cards. Our page feels a bit static, and we already know that the large number of Widgets that we will be dealing with will not be especially usable on a static list. What can we do to help?

3 0
0 1.2K
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.

12 5
1 1.2K

or "Bonus Breakage"

In our last lesson, we added a relationship between 2 persistent classes. We are clearly going to need to start creating REST Services to expose CRUD operations for each of these classes, but before we do that, we should really finish defining our linkages. We added code to our Widget toJSON to spool off related Accessory data, so we should really do the reciprocal and allow Accessories to return all Widgets that are compatible.

3 2
1 1.1K

This series of articles aims to address the following topics:

  • Creation of a web application based on REST pages;
  • Overview of some tools for tracing (debugging) HTTP requests;
  • Switching from hyperevents to... hyperevents;
  • Integration with jQuery File Upload;
  • Conversion of JSON from the {id:1,parentId:1} format to the {id:1,children:[{}]} format for tree visualization;
  • Integration with jQuery EasyUI (using datagrid and tree as examples);
  • Other topics.

5 1
1 935

Interesting anecdote I want to share. Not 100% Caché related, but I hope it would be useful.

When CSP Gateway is configured on IIS, opening CSP Gateway Configuration page is prohibited by default -- as IIS blocks URLs with '/bin' in it.

In our documentation we advise to add <remove segment="bin" /> to applicationHost.config file.
That is correct.

4 0
0 892
Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Can you keep a secret?

If you are developing applications that use CSP or Zen, or potentially any of the other InterSystems web-related stuff that's built on top of CSP, then it's important to know how to keep one particular secret.

A central part of the CSP security architecture is a server-side session key. "Server-side" because its value should never be revealed to the client that is issuing the web requests. If it is revealed, a malicious client might be able to use it to bypass your security and make your server do things you don't want it to.

7 1
0 651

Hi Community,

This post is a introduction of my open exchange iris-fhir-client application.

iris-fhir-client can connect to any open FHIR Server by using embedded python with the help of fhirpy Library.
Get Resource information by terminal and by using CSP web application.

6 2
0 633
Article
· Jul 31, 2019 2m read
Anti CSRF Methods

IRIS provides us with anti login CSRF attack mitigation, however this is not the same as a CSRF attack, as login attacks only occur on the login form. There are currently no built-in tools to mitigate CSRF attacks on api calls and other forms, so this is a step in mitigating these attacks.

See the following link from OWASP for the definition of a CSRF attack:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(CSRF)

4 5
1 630

In the WRC, we often see customers raise questions regarding a new Web Gateway setup where the Management Portal half-loads, but doesn’t show images. This article will explain why this error occurs, as well as how to fix it. This explanation is focused on the Web Gateway serving InterSystems IRIS instances, but the same explanation should apply to the CSP Gateway serving Caché instances as well.

7 3
0 611