IRIS Interoperability Productions formerly known as Ensemble are fun to work with. Yes, I really think my work is fun. I have seen File Passthrough Services and File Passthrough Operations come in handy. At one point we placed test messages in files, then we utilized a File Passthrough Service with Inbound File Adapter to send the contents of the file as a Stream to a File Passthrough Operation with Outbound TCP Adapter.

Triggered by a question placed by @Kurro Lopez recently
I took a closer look at the indexing of collections.
My simple test setup is a serial class and a persistent class with a list of this serial.

In most cases, a global used by default storage has just 1 subscript level that represents the IDKEY.
For an index-globals we may see 2 or more subscript levels.
Arrays, or parent-child relationships or persistent classes extending a base data class
are examples where we see more levels. Though all these globals are quite uniform.

Standard error logs in IRIS / Caché / Ensemble are written global ^ERRORS.
As this piece dates back some decades back to previous millennium its structure
is far from the typical SQL storage structures.

It is a classic Global Mapping exercise presenting ^SPOOL as Class / Table

Background

Device #2 named SPOOL dates back to the predecessors of Caché and IRIS
It was the first "%Stream" like option to buffer output before printing.
It is also the first and till today the most simple way of output redirection.

Solution

This is also an example of a mapped Global.
USE 2 redirects the output into the Global ^SPOOL

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).

The Command extension enables the execution of Multi-Line Commands from Terminal prompt.

Terminal Multi-Line Input with Edit, Insert, Delete, Print extension for IRIS and Caché
IRIS and Caché have just single command lines in terminal available
This Multi-Line Commands Editor also will execute the Multi-line Commands.
In addition, it is independent of access to %SYS and can be installed in any namespace

Special thanks to @Jeffrey Drumm who inspired me to this and supported me as beta-tester.

The Command extension enables the execution of Multi-Line Commands from Terminal prompt.

Installation & Execution

Import %ZML.xml to Namespace %SYS

Optionally you may add this line to your %ZLANGC00.mac for a simplified use:

ZML do ^%zml quit  ; add multi line command in terminal

and
USER>zml

otherwise, just call it from the terminal command prompt

In this article I'd like to share with you a phenomena that is best you avoid - something you should be aware of when designing your data model (or building your Business Processes) in Caché or in Ensemble (or older HealthShare Health Connect Ensemble-based versions).

Hi ObjectScript developers!

InterSystems ObjectScript is perhaps the best language on the planet to deal with globals - and it is an interpretable language.

Yes, it has a compiler. But even the compiler can compile some lines in ObjectScript which will then fire as bugs during the runtime.

There are some technics on how to avoid that such as unit testing, coding guidelines and your coding experience, of course ;)

Here I want to present to you the yet another approach to how you can reduce the number of errors in your ObjectScript runtime and enforce coding guidelines - it's an ObjectScript Quality tool developed by Lite Solutions, InterSystems solution partner.

See the details below.

While the classic solution followed rather close the concepts and design of the ancestors
Caché / IRIS allows a more modern approach to flexible/multidimensional properties

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.
{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them }

The typical WHERE condition in SQL relates mostly to some content of the rows you work on.
So it needs to be calculated and checked for each row you access.
Differently (and that's why I named it STATIC) is a WHERE condition that is independent of the rows you access.

I'm always on the lookout for tools that make the development and testing of my interfaces more efficient. A couple of years ago I came across HL7 Spy, from Inner Harbour Software. It quickly became my go-to tool for running message comparison reports for interface engine migrations, message statistics gathering, and troubleshooting message receipt and delivery. It also offered enhanced functionality for things like fetching messages via sftp that other tools don't provide.

I've recently been working with HL7 Spy's author, Jon Reis, to enable support for fetching messages directly from the Ensemble message store. Its SQL Loader feature now has native Caché/IRIS support, and I've contributed a small server-side class to support the extraction of messages using it.