Hello!

This article is a small overview of a tool that helps to understand classes and their structure inside the InterSystems products: from IRIS to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare.

In short, it visualizes a class or an entire package, shows the relations between classes and provides all the possible information to developers and team leads without making them go to Studio and examine the code there.

If you are learning InterSystems products, reviewing projects a lot or just interested in something new in InterSystems Technology solutions — you are more than welcome to read the overview of ObjectScript Class Explorer!

The Interoperability user interface now includes modernized user experiences for the DTL Editor and Production Configuration applications that are available for opt-in in all interoperability products. You can switch between the modernized and standard views. All other Interoperability screens remain in the Standard user interface. Please note that changes are limited to these two applications and we identify below the functionality that is currently available. 

To try out the new screens prior to upgrading, you can download the 2025.

Hello
This article follows up on the question I had asked the community UDP Adapter not working
In this article, I will present to you
1) What is "UDP"?
2) The current state of Iris with UDP
3) My solution with the UDP adapter

1) What is "UDP"?

UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. It is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol (IP) suite, used for transmitting data over a network. Here are some key features of UDP:

1. Connectionless: UDP does not establish a connection before sending data, which means it can send messages (datagrams) without prior handshaking.

GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

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.

In this article, we will discuss about Orphaned Messages.

What is an Orphaned Message

Every message body is associated with a message Header which holds the metadata. The Header holds information like source configuration name, target configuration name, time created, time processed, associated message body reference, session information, message body class name, message status. When there are message body records that do not have their corresponding Header records those are called Orphan message bodies. We will discuss possible causes which could end up with orphan message bodies.

How to develop an interoperability solution in one code base and then use it to generate many individual interfaces

Overview

In 2009 I wrote the first of several Interfaces for LabTrak. The Interfaces allowed existing National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) clients to send Patient Demographics and Orders to LabTrak. LabTrak would, in turn, send the results of those tests back to the client. I wrote 3 or 4 at the time and an Interface that fed data from LabTrak into the NHLS Corporate Data Warehouse.

This 'feature' have been around for a long time, but I don't see any articles on it so I thought I would make everyone aware.

A method is provided to customize the appearance of the Cache cube icon in the system tray so different instances can be visually distinguished.  When csystray.exe, the Cache/Ensemble cube program, starts, it will look for files named "up.ico" and "down.ico" in the \bin directory below the instance installation directory.  If these .ico files are present, csystray.exe will load the icons and display them in place of the default blue and gray Cache/Ensemble cube icons.

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).

If you had the opportunity to change something in the IRIS Interoperability Message Viewer, what would you do?

"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.

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.

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:

I am regularly contacted by customers about memory sizing when they get alerts that free memory is below a threshold, or they observe that free memory has dropped suddenly. Is there a problem? Will their application stop working because it has run out of memory for running system and application processes? Nearly always, the answer is no, there is nothing to worry about. But that simple answer is usually not enough. What's going on?

Consider the chart below. It is showing the output of the free metric in vmstat.

Over the years, I have found myself needing to create multiple HL7 messages based on a single inbound message. Usually these take the form of an order or result from a lab. Each time I have approached it, I have tried to start from scratch under the belief that the previous attempt could have been done better.

Recently, the need arose again and I was able to create a solution that I wasn't ashamed of. My main concern was that I would always either find myself getting buried in a BPL, or use ObjectScript and attempt to edit messages using the SetValueAt Method for the HL7 Message Class.

Hi all! Here I would like to share how we use vector search and GenAI with InterSystems technology. As an example, I'll describe BG-AppealAI project, which our company submitted to the InterSystems Vector Search, GenAI and ML Contest. BG-AppealAI application can write an appeal if you upload an insurance contract and the insurance company’s letter with a refusal to pay medical expenses. Of course, we are aware that at the moment AI has not reached such a level as to create ready-made legal documents.

This formation, accessible on my GitHub, will cover, in half a hour, how to read and write in csv and txt files, insert and get inside the IRIS database and a distant database using Postgres or how to use a FLASK API, all of that using the Interoperability framework using ONLY Python following the PEP8 convention.

This formation can mostly be done using copy paste and will guide you through everystep before challenging you with a global exercise.
We are available to answer any question or doubt in the comment of that post, on teams or even by mail at lucas.enard@intersystems.com .

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.

The basic stipulations for this example are as follows:

1. Accept a PDF file
2. Accept an HL7 message
3. Using the name of the PDF file, embed the PDF data into the HL7 message
4. Output the message to file

Using EnsLib.

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.

FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, is a new format for healthcare data that aims at solving these problems.

When using InterSystems IRIS as an interoperability engine, we all know and love how easy it is to use the Message Viewer to review message traces and see exactly what's going on in your production. When a system is handling millions of messages per day, you may not know exactly where to begin your investigation though.

Over my years supporting IRIS productions, I often find myself investigating things like...

• What sort of throughput does this workflow have?
• Where is the bottleneck?
• What are my most common

Host Variables are a rather common programming feature in many implementations of SQL. 
A recent question in DC made me aware that in IRIS, Caché, Ensemble, ... 
host variables just exist within embedded SQL

>  You can supply host variables for Embedded SQL queries only. <

Related examples are included in the available Documentation

This is a description  for a workaround if you don't / can't use embedded SQL.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

If you want to raise an arbitrary custom error in a TRY block, you can pass an exception with a throw as follows. In the following example, a custom error is raised if Stcount is less than 1.

Class User.Test
{

ClassMethod ExceptionTest()
 {
    try
    {
      // : some codes
      if (Stcount<1) {
          throw ##class(%Exception.General).%New("User-defined error", "5001", "location", "Data at location error")
          // User-created errors are 5001 and above
      }
    }
    catch ex
    {
      write "Errors #", ex.Code, ": ", ex.Name, " : ", ex.

The %Net.SSH.Session class lets you connect to servers using SSH. It's most commonly used with SFTP, especially in the FTP inbound and outbound adaptors.

In this article, I'm going to give a quick example of how to connect to an SSH server using the class, describe your options for authenticating, and how to debug when things go wrong.

Here's an example of making the connection:

Set SSH = ##class(%Net.SSH.Session).%New()
Set return=SSH.Connect("ftp.intersystems.com")​

This creates a new connection, and then connects to the ftp.intersystems.com SFTP server on the default port.

My intention is to show how simple it is to generate a lookup table taking into account the information received in our HL7 messaging. The HL7 message lookup table provided by IRIS is certainly sufficient for most of the searches we want to perform, but we always have that special field in our HIS, LIS, RIS, etc. that we'd like to search by. But that's in a segment outside of that lookup table. That field forces us to generate a specific search using the expanded search criteria. We'll likely have many messages, and we'll also have to filter by date and time so we don't timeout.

InterSystems periodically updates our software release policies and practices to adjust to customer needs.

We're now changing our maintenance release cadence in order to be more predictable for customers and partners, and tweaking a few other areas.

This article summarizes the release cadence for our Data Platforms products and recent changes to it, and announces a few new updates.

Why change?

• Our customers are taking our new releases more quickly.
• Our customers are adopting new platforms versions (operating systems and orchestrators) more quickly.

During a major version upgrade it is advisable to recompile the classes and routines of all your namespaces (see Major Version Post-Installation Tasks).

do $system.OBJ.CompileAllNamespaces("u")

do ##Class(%Routine).CompileAllNamespaces()

To automate this administration task and keep a log of any errors, below is an example of a class to import and compile into the USER namespace that you can use after each upgrade : admin.utils.cls

Class admin.

Starting out with ObjectScript, it is really exciting, but it can also feel a little unusual if you're used to other languages. Many beginners trip over the same hurdles, so here are a few "gotchas" you'll want to watch out for. (Also few friendly tips to avoid them)

NAMING THINGS RANDOMLY

We have all been guilty of naming something Test1 or MyClass just to move on quickly. But once your project grows, these names become a nightmare. 

➡ Pick clear, consistent names from the start. Think of it as leaving breadcrumbs for your future self and your teammates.

I recently met an ages old issue related to code maintenance:

• You have access to your IRIS server just over ODBC/JDBC
• no VSCode access, no Studio access
• no (Web-)Terminal access

But you need to take a look on Classes or Routines or Globals !!
Anyhow SQL is your friend.

• First you need a simple table as temporary text store.

CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE  arcc.txt (line VARCHAR(32000))

Not a thrilling action.

• Next you export your code to local file and import it to your table

CREATE PROCEDURE arcc.show (IN code VARCHAR()) 
  RETURNS INTEGER
  LANGUAGE OBJECTSCRIPT 
 {
	set file="code

Background

In InterSystems IRIS versions >=2021.2 we can use the accompanying irispython binary to directly write python code on top of our IRIS instances. This lets us use python packages, call methods, make SQL queries, and do nearly anything in Objectscript but pythonic.

For example, below I check if a namespace is present:

#!/usr/irissys/bin/irispython
import iris
# call arbitrary class methods
result = iris.cls('%SYS.Namespace').Exists('USER')
if result == 1:
    print(f"Namespace USER is present")

But, what if my method in IRIS has special parameters such as Output and ByRef parameters?