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!

21 35
3 5.5K

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.

17 24
10 2.4K

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.

9 22
2 7.1K
Article
· Apr 20, 2016 1m read
Feedback on Product Documentation?

We are in the process of putting a new UI on the existing product documentation, including a mobile-optimized view. We also plan on releasing additional "solution based" documentation that is targeted at common usage scenarios or important configuration tasks.

We are interested in your feedback on our current product documentation - what you like and dislike and especially what changes you would expect to see to make it as useful as possible.

3 15
0 835

While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

6 15
4 1K

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Warning: if you get confused by URLs used: the original series used screens from machine called dk-gs2016. The new screenshots are taken from a different machine. You can safely treat url WIN-U9J96QBJSAG as if it was dk-gs2016.

Part 2. Authorization server, OpenID Connect server

9 12
3 5.1K

1.Background

1.1 I met a few project that their interface servers were crashed. Cutoms wanted resume server as fast as we can. their servers are running at lan,and they can't use git,there are some namesapce in the server running different service,and usualy there is only one server.

1.2 In the message,it has property in type of characterstream,as you know,the message search page doesn't support filtering with property of characterstream,so it's so hard to find the messge you want.

10 11
2 555
Article
· Dec 22, 2015 1m read
Sign and verify in SMIME format

In some project, I found the need to use SMIME format https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3851.txt, basically is an standard used to wrap a message together with its signature using a certificate (usually X509). Ensemble don't have a single class to do that but inside the Ensemble installation we have the openssl utility, so in this example I use the "openssl smime" command to sign or verify a message.

The example has two Business Process that able to sign or verify and in order to test I made a simple production.

Hope this helps

0 10
0 607
Article
· Jan 15, 2016 1m read
Activity Monitor in Ensemble 2016.1

Has anyone tried the new Activity Volume Statistics and Monitoring in Ensembel 2016.1? I would love to get some feedback.

If you haven't read about this, there is a dashboard that provides counts and response times for messages sent and received by each configuration item. Alternatively the underlying data is arranged in tables that should make it easy for you to use your favorite SQL reporting tools to generate reports for short term performance monitoring or longer term capacity planning.

Dave

0 9
2 987
Article
· May 16, 2017 3m read
The COS Faker

Hi Community,

This post is to introduce one of my first project in COS, I created when started to learn the language and until today I'm keeping improve it.

The CosFaker(here on Github) is a pure COS library for generating fake data.

cosFaker vs Populate Utils

So why use cosFaker if caché has the populate data utility?

10 8
2 923

I am pleased to announce the field test of Caché and Ensemble 2016.3 - with many new improvements.

The product team at InterSystems looks forward to your participation in the field test and feedback over the coming months.

Some of the more signification changes in 2016.3 are new RESTful APIs for iKnow and broader APIs for programmatic control of multiple servers (enterprise manager). As always, there are a host of scalability and performance improvements, including improvements to the core database and SQL. And hundreds of smaller improvements and corrections.

6 8
0 941
Article
· Jul 8, 2020 7m read
Tips for debugging with %Status

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

15 7
11 1.8K
Article
· Apr 9, 2019 3m read
IRIS/Ensemble as an ETL

IRIS and Ensemble are designed to act as an ESB/EAI. This mean they are build to process lots of small messages.

But some times, in real life we have to use them as ETL. The down side is not that they can't do so, but it can take a long time to process millions of row at once.

To improve performance, I have created a new SQLOutboundAdaptor who only works with JDBC.

BatchSqlOutboundAdapter

Extend EnsLib.SQL.OutboundAdapter to add batch batch and fetch support on JDBC connection.

3 7
2 1.4K

I wanted to share a little tidbit which is in the Studio documentation (http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?...) but many people who have been using the InterSystems Studio for a long time missed the addition of this *very* useful feature, and every time I mention this to an audience I see at least one face light up because of how excited they are to learn about it!

Within Studio, the Output pane (View -> Output) is actually misnamed. It is actually an Input/Output window which can be used to run Caché ObjectScript commands!

10 7
0 1.3K

One of the topics that comes up often when managing Ensemble productions is disk space:

The database (the CACHE.DAT file) grows in a rate that was unexpected; or the Journal files build up at a fast pace; or the database grows continuously though the system has a scheduled purge of the Ensemble runtime data.

It would have been better if these kind of phenomena would have been observed and accounted for yet at the development and testing stage rather than on a live system.

For this purpose I created a basic framework that could aid in this task.

4 7
2 1.3K
Article
· Mar 6, 2016 2m read
Who does Windows think I am?

When my COS code is executing in a Caché process it might want to interact with the host operating system. For the purpose of this post I'm focusing on a Windows host, but much of it applies to other host OS platforms as well.

A common example of host OS interaction is when my process wants to read from or write to a file. What credentials will apply when Windows is checking whether or not to allow me access to the file?

To answer that we need to consider another question. How did our process start?

3 6
0 959

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.

6 6
0 1.3K
Article
· Jul 25, 2019 1m read
Disabling an Ensemble Production

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

2 6
1 392

In this article I will demonstrate the following :

  • Update ReferencesRange(OBX:7) against ObservationIdentifier(OBX:3.1)[TestCode] from database by using custom utility function
  • Update Abnormal Flag(OBX:8) against ObservationIdentifier(OBX:3.1)[TestCode] and ObservationValue(OBX:5)[Result] from database utility function
  • Route Message based on Abnormal Flag(OBX:8)

Below is the primary and transformed HL7 2.5 ORU_R01 message:

1 6
0 736
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.

2 6
0 623