Ensemble

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.

Enterprises need to grow and manage their global computing infrastructures rapidly and efficiently while simultaneously optimizing and managing capital costs and expenses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing and storage services meet the needs of the most demanding Caché based application by providing
 a highly robust global computing infrastructure.

The code of %Z.obj is available on Open Exchange.

During testing your code you are are often confronted with the need to examine
the actual content of an object. Either using ZWRITE or $system.OBJ.Dump()
you get a picture of simple properties as "--- attribute values ---"
while "--- swizzled references ---" are more confusing than informative
and with "--- calculated references ---" you are just left in the lurch.

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.

"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.

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!  

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.

Running a Background Job using JOB command is a well-known feature.
Using ECP to distribute databases to several servers is also well know.
But using the combination of both to run a process on a different server
seems to be a rare case.

The example is available in Open Exchange

Save the date!

Just in case this hasn't reached you (or your manager didn't pass it to you  )

https://www.intersystems.com/de/news-events/events/veranstaltung/intersystems-dach-symposium-2019/

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?

This article will describe and include an example of how to embed an external PDF file into an HL7 segment, specifically ADT_A01:2.3.1 OBX().  This can be useful when attempting to insert pictures or other external data into an HL7 message.  In this example, the name of the PDF file to be embedded is provided in the incoming HL7 message in OBX(1):ObservationValue field.

When running the built in Ensemble Purge task (Ens.Util.Tasks.Purge) there are three parameters DaysToKeep, BodiesToo, and KeepIntegrity.  This article focuses on the KeepIntegrity boolean parameter, but more information about running this task can be found here:

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

KeepIntegrity determines which Ensemble Messages are marked for deletion within the time specified by DaysToKeep. 

I have been meaning to make a post about this topic for a few weeks and the other day an issue came in through the WRC about it so it seems this is a conversation we should be having. I want to begin by taking a few moments to explain "Why Atelier" then we can talk about what this means in the general sense for Studio and Atelier and Caché developers. We have wrestled with what to do with Studio for years. When I moved to Product Management in 2008 this was already a "thing". At the time we could not reach a consensus. Some felt Studio was fine as is.