InterSystems technologies are renowned for their high performing databases, which support the systems and operations of many organisations. However a key ingredient to this success is the quality and maintainability of their code.

The quality of code can impact everything from speed and ease of fixing bugs and making enhancements, to the overall performance of your organization and your ability to get ahead in the marketplace.

By ensuring your code is maintainable, you can reduce approximately 75% of the systems life cycle costs*. This is why, at George James Software, the solutions we build are always straightforward and written in high quality code - because we know that this solid foundation can positively impact the rest of your organization.

With a maintainable system you're able to reduce your overall maintenance as any issues that occur are significantly faster to identify and fix. This means you're free to allocate that time and budget to enhancements, enabling you to get the most value out of your applications and ultimately better support your organization.

Keep an eye out for our next few posts about what a maintainable system looks like and the tools that can help you keep your code maintainable, in order to help you to reduce those maintenance costs.

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Article
· Oct 1, 2018 4m read
Profiling code using Caché Monitor

Not everyone knows that InterSystems Caché has a built-in tool for code profiling called Caché Monitor.

Its main purpose (obviously) is the collection of statistics for programs running in Caché. It can provide statistics by program, as well as detailed Line-by-Line statistics for each program.

Using Caché Monitor

Let’s take a look at a potential use case for Caché Monitor and its key features. So, in order to start the profiler, you need to go to the terminal and switch to the namespace that you want to monitor, then launch the %SYS.MONLBL system routine:

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Article
· Oct 12, 2016 12m read
RESTful API

Beginner’s guide to RESTful Application Program Interface (API) design and documentation. Through the example you will learn some common pattern for RESTful API.

Before you read

You need to know

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

For volatile tables (tables with many INSERTs and DELETEs), storage for bitmap indexes can become inefficient over time.

For example, suppose that there are thousands of data with the following definition, and the operation of bulk deletion with TRUNCATE TABLE after being retained for a certain period of time is repeatedly performed.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

Record maps are used to efficiently map files containing delimited records or fixed-width records to message classes used by the interoperability function, and to map files from interoperability function message classes to text files.

Record map mapping definitions can be created using the Management Portal, and we also provide a CSV record wizard that allows you to define while reading a CSV file.

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Article
· Feb 3, 2016 1m read
2016.2 Field Test Kit 2016.2.0.585.0

I am pleased to announce the next in the series of 2016.2 field test kits, 2016.2.0.585.0.

In the two weeks since the last field test posting Development has made over a hundred fixes and improvements in Atelier, Enterprise Manager, Ensemble and Caché.

In Atelier alone there were over a dozen changes including a fix for the incompatibility issue that Jamie Newton described in his posting of February 1.

In Caché major areas of focus include:

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We heard from a customer who wanted to display a version number as a read-only production setting. During the build on the build server, this version number is added to the Production class. This works fine, and the Version is displayed in the Portal, but the customer wanted to write protect it, so the enduser can’t change it. The customer had defined the setting like this:

Property Version As %String;
Parameter SETTINGS = "Version:Info";

We advised the customer to define SETTINGS like this instead:

Parameter SETTINGS = "Version:Alerting:label"

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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.

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Feel at home on the Home page

Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:

If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.

On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you.

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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.

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Article
· Sep 23, 2021 1m read
Zero configuration debugging

The latest release of Serenji by George James Software introduces zero configuration debugging, so it's ready to go in just one click - no matter where you are or what you're doing, your on-the-spot debugger is ready to go. 

We have introduced a host of new features to enhance the debugging experience so you can focus on identifying and fixing errors, without losing focus by spending time setting up a launch configuration. 

Check out the new features in our release notes

If you've already started using Serenji 3.2.0 let us know how you're getting on! 

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Wanted to share something I learned recently while working on a problem. We needed to add and change some Business Hosts in one of our edge productions.

In the past, we simply added the production class to CCR and then spreading it around. But there was a problem because different developers were working on different things, and we only wanted to include only the relevent production changes onto the CCR.

Here's a little piece of code that can help add new things to an existing production:

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If multiple InterSystems products are installed on the same system, the latest version of the InterSystems ODBC driver among the installed products will remain registered in the driver manager.

You can change to any driver by changing the registry entry below.

Please note that running RegFiles.bat does not change the ODBC driver.

The registry entry is as follows.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

There is no need to recompile the routines after the version upgrade, but since the version update overwrites %SYS, user-created INT and OBJ format routines (*.INT,*.OBJ) in %SYS will be deleted. Therefore, you need to be careful.

MAC, INT and OBJ routines with the following names are not deleted.

%Z*.INT, %z*.INT, Z*.INT,z*.INT
%Z*.OBJ, %z*.OBJ, Z*.OBJ,z*.OBJ

Please note that classes/CSPs need to be compiled after upgrading.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If a relationship is set and there is a large number of n in a 1:n ratio, a large amount of memory may be consumed due to sequential processing of the relationship.

After referencing a many-sided object in a program and internally swizzling it, simply releasing the variable containing the OREF (deleting it, setting another value, etc.) will not free the many-sided object and the relationship object. This is the cause.

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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:

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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.

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Article
· Mar 14, 2016 3m read
Source control and the production class

When you create an Ensemble production your namespace acquires a new class definition. For example here is what the class that defines the Demo.Loan.BankUSProduction production in the ENSDEMO namespace looks like when opened in Studio:

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