Article
· May 16, 2016 11m read
Accelerate Ensemble

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.

10 1
1 1,549
Article
· Oct 6, 2016 4m read
RESTful Exception Handling

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.

3 1
0 1,543

Below is a simple alert processor based on the EnsLib.HTTP.OutboundAdapter to send text alerts via an SMS Gateway service. Typically, all that is needed to send an HTTP Post to the gateway service is the destination phone number, a source phone number, credentials, and the URL.

The code below is based on the Anveo gateway whose interface is as follows:

5 5
1 1,505
Article
· Sep 6, 2017 4m read
Polling an External REST API with Ensemble

Preface

Before we begin, I'd like to mention that I am by no means an Ensemble expert, so take this with a grain of salt and please feel free to offer any suggestions for improvement. That being said, I have enjoyed working with Ensemble and wanted to share the approach I took to poll an external REST API for patient data in the hopes that it might help others with a similar goal.

2 5
0 1,410

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.

16 2
0 1,407
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).

14 7
10 1,386

Healthcare interoperability is instrumental in improving patient care, decreasing healthcare provider costs, and providing a more accurate picture to providers. However, with so many different systems, data is formatted in many different ways. There are many standards that have been created to try to solve this problem, including HL7v2, HL7v3, and CDA but each one has its drawbacks.

12 2
1 1,362

Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is one of the basic security features built into browsers. CORS controls accessing resources from a HTML page in domains other than the original domain. It is particularly important for AJAX calls. Since RESTful services can be used as data provider to any AJAX call, you have to be able to control cross-origin access. By default services are not allowed to do CORS. You are going to learn how to enable it for Ensemble RESTful services.

3 0
0 1,304

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 1,219

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 1,214
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 1,185

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 1,174

"Telegram" is a well-known instant messenger, which provides an API for creating bots. The features of this API allow you to create bots with a wide range of functionality including receiving payments.
With the help of the telegram bot, I solved a simple task - sending Alerts from Ensemble to Telegram.

Advantages: Alerts come to the mobile phone, a notification appears, so there is no need to install any additional applications (in contrast to the solution https://community.intersystems.com/post/sending-alerts-mobile-phone-using-pushover- httpoutboundadapter).

The bot can be extended by adding new commands, for example, for managing the Production or for solving other tasks in Iris, Ensemble or Cache.

14 0
6 1,165

I wanted to see some alerts that occur in my Productions in a Mobile Device, I came across Pushover.net recently that although has an upfront cost $5 you can send as many messages as you like after that, there is a 7 day free trial to check it out.

To Integrate this with a production I did the following.

Create an account and set up a device on https://pushover.net/

Record the following API Keys from the web site on the main page you will see

3 5
0 1,109
Article
· Jan 25, 2016 1m read
2016.2 Field Test

I am pleased to announce the field test of Caché and Ensemble 2016.2 - an exciting new release with improvements on many different fronts.

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

Some of the more profound changes in 2016.2 include:

6 6
0 1,063
Article
· Jul 4, 2020 2m read
Terminal Multi-Line Command Editor

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.

8 1
0 996

At least three different ways to process errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE etc is given in ObjectScript. Most systems have status, but for a range of reasons exceptions are more convenient to manage. You spend some time translating between the various techniques dealing with legacy code. For reference, I use several of these excerpts. It is hoped that they will also support others.

4 2
2 983

Each business component in Ensemble picks up its allocated jobs from a pool, and the Pool Size setting for each component determines how many jobs each component can work on each time. In this article we will be specifically discussing different Pool Size settings for Business Processes.

Pool Size = 1

5 3
0 968

This is more for my memory that anything else but I thought I'd share it because it often comes up in comments, but is not in the InterSystems documentation.

There is a wonderful utility called ^REDEBUG that increases the level of logging going into mgr\cconsole.log.

You activate it by

a) start terminal/login

b) zn "%SYS"

c) do ^REDEBUG

6 0
0 926