If you deal with multiple instances of Caché / Ensemble / HealthShare and sometimes have to work at the Terminal command prompt, did you know that you can easily add extra information to that prompt which may help prevent you running a command on the wrong instance?

In this posting I want to raise the profile of a feature that arrived in 2009.1 but is perhaps not very well known.

It is sometimes useful to make certain packages, globals or routines available to all of your namespaces. Of course you can add the necessary mappings whenever you create a new namespace, but here's a simpler way.

Amongst the large fonts and chunky icons of Portal's pages, the Menu button in the top left corner is easily overlooked:

When clicked, it often produces the following menu:

When I remember it's there, I find the "View Console Log" option particularly handy.

I wrote "often" above because I've also noticed that the Menu contents change when I'm on a page within the Ensemble section of Portal:

User interfaces such as Portal often give us multiple ways of doing a task. Sometimes we stick with habits and don't realize that another way might save us time.

Here's one that I learned by watching someone else using Portal.

Use the Search box to get quickly to a page that may otherwise be several layers deep in the Portal hierarchy. For example, suppose I want to check the status of the ECP networking:

Many mobile applications that enable users to get information about road fines and pay them, send notifications about newly added fines. This functionality can be efficiently implemented using push notifications sent to users’ devices.

Our application was not an exception. The server side is based on the Ensemble platform that offers integrated support of push notifications starting from version 2015.1.

Question:

How do I get a list of files residing in a certain folder/directory, according to some wildcard/filter.

For example all '*.txt' files in 'C:\Temp'.

Answer:

In CACHE –

You can use the %Library.File's FileSet class query.

Here's some sample code using it (also attached):

Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. ​

Many of us installed Ensemble a few years ago, estimated space to be sufficient and now run into surprise - hard drives are getting full!

When running the built in Ensemble Purge task (Ens.Util.Tasks.Purge) there are three parameters DaysToKeep, BodiesToo, and KeepIntegrity. This article focuses on the KeepIntegrity boolean parameter, but more information about running this task can be found here:

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

KeepIntegrity determines which Ensemble Messages are marked for deletion within the time specified by DaysToKeep.

This article explains how Atelier helps you to improve software development productivity. One of the Ensemble features is the VDoc infrastructure. When someone develops HL7 v2.* production, She/ He is in a luxurious situation because Ensemble comes with a HL7 Schema editor. On the other hand this is not the case with XML VDocs. But with some effort you can turn Atelier to a handy XSD editor and close the gap.

Please follow the step-by-step guide to complete the job.

Before you read

Please make sure that you have

This is a beginner’s guide to the design of a “MicroService” implemented in Ensemble. “MicroService” is a popular phrase these days which has a broad interpretation. My interpretation is: “MicroService” is a “NoSQL Service”. A what? The answer is in the article.

We learnt what the difference is between SQL and NoSQL databases. For me the difference is nearly the same between a SOA Web Service and a “MicroService”. I am going to explain it through an example.

A beginner’s guide to Exception Handling in RESTful web services. The article gives an example how the various error conditions during processing a service request can be handled.

We expect our client – server communication working in a flawless operational condition, running error free software. But we are prepared to handle exceptions. Are we? So far in the examples of the previous sessions were not. We did not care about exceptions. The result? In any error incident it took ages to figure out what the problem is and more importantly how to fix it.

The article is a step by step guide for beginners to learn how to build a RESTful web service consumer (or client) in Ensemble. The provider can be any RESTful service, but the example is based on the service we made during the previous sessions.

Preface: our small, but very ambitious company called “Black Mushroom Studio” came up with an idea for an e-commerce project and a mobile app that would let users pay for certain goods/services via a payment aggregator.

What we had initially: an Android app skeleton that, of course, liked communicating via HTTP and JSON, and a payment system with an API – web services with SOAP content.

Goal: make it all work together.