This is a detailed guide to develop RESTful services using InterSystems Ensemble. The goal of this guide is to make you understanding the basic concept and building blocks of a RESTful service. The service is going to provide a very basic functionality (a “Hello world!”).

You will learn how to create required components as Ensemble classes, configure the run-time as an Ensemble Production and create a service configuration as a web application.

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

This short article was motivated by a problem of one of my customers. They use Ensemble to integrate many systems, some of them use just plain files.

So they naturally selected File Outbound Adapter to write into target file. Things were running smoothly for years, until recently, when the volume of data being written to the file reached large size of tens of megabytes. The operation took around half an hour to complete, causing timing problems where subsequent operations within the process had to wait, and third party system was not happy to wait so long.

This is the first follow up after the post about headstarting SAPJCo3 with Ensemble and HealthShare ( https://community.intersystems.com/post/headstart-connect-sap-using-sapjco3-ensemble-and-healthshare).

Hello,

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.

July 6th, 2016

InterSystems has corrected a defect with Mirroring that can impact data integrity

The defect is present in all released versions Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare beginning with 2015.2.0. It is present for all platforms and affects both failover and asynchronous mirroring configurations.

The message viewer can resend messages but it is not suitable for resending a large number of messages (>100). For that, you should use Cache Object Script code such as the following:

DTL Transformations and GetValueAt/SetValueAt calls on HL7 messages will truncate any fields longer than 32K. To avoid this, the methods GetFieldStreamRaw and StoreFieldStreamRaw must be used when dealing with fields that might be larger than 32K. OBX:5 is a frequent example. These methods have some subtleties and must be used carefully.

This can't be done by simply dragging from left to right in a DTL. It must be done with a code action. Also, the StoreFieldStreamRaw call must be the last edit made to the segment because the segment becomes immutable after that.

Steve Glassman is on vacation today so in his place I wanted to announce the availability of a new kit for the 2016.2 Field Test. The kit details are: 2016.2.0.665.0

There is a wide range of changes to the 2016.2 Field Test, 145 of them in total. You can find a complete listing here:

https://wrc.intersystems.com/wrc/WRC.StreamServer.cls?FILE=/wrc/FieldTes...

Bill McCormick

Director of Product Management

Java Business Services and Operations

In Ensemble 2016.3 ‘Java Business Hosts’ provides the means to create new Business Services and Business Operations using Java without need for any ObjectScript coding. There are two major reasons to use this capability:

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.

Introducing non-persistent messages. eXpert-to-eXpert

Background

InterSystems Ensemble as a tool does a lot for the Developer. One of the nice features is the Message trace utility. It shows a message flow diagram. The diagram shows the progress of the message processing real time. You can get many-many useful information from the production. In any case, someone needs to find a bug in a production implementation, without the Message trace utility it could turn into a real nightmare.

On the other hand, keeping message “traceability” is not for free. A heavy loaded production can very quickly run out of resources just because of the house keeping functions of Ensemble. House keeping functions such as maintaining message header, log entries, message queue generates a significant load on the Caché database used by Ensemble.

This article is about to show how to force Ensemble work more for the everyday life, instead of being prepared for “any-time-debugging”.

This is an eXpert-to-eXpert article. Therefore, I assume the deep understanding of Ensemble.

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.