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.

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.

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.

When calling out to web services there are several settings of the Business Operation that play together in controlling what will happen when a response is not returned in the desired time.

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.

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.

The Ensemble Scheduler is used for automatically turning on and off business hosts at certain dates and times. You could use it if, for example, you wanted to only run a business host from 9am to 5pm every day. Conversely, if you want do to trigger an event to occurr at a specific time, for example, a job running at 1am to batch up and send off all the previous day's transactions in one file, we recommend other methods such as the Task Manager.

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of Caché and Ensemble 2016.1.

The highlights of 2016.1 are

• Significant improvements in JSON support
• Continued advances in SQL performance
• Database scalability improvements
• New REST services for DeepSee

These and other new features are summarized in this video introduction to 2016.1

For complete technical details of what’s changed in 2016.1, review the Caché release notes and the Ensemble release notes.

Two fairly common requests we receive from HL7 customers are (1) how to remove all trailing delimiters for fields and segments in HL7 messages and (2) how to "find and replace" for an entire HL7 message (as opposed to one segment/field at a time). The code sample below shows a custom function that solves for item 1 and by extension item 2 above. In other words the same approach can be used for finding/replacing any sequence of chars in an entire HL7 message, with some tweaks to the custom function.

I am pleased to announce the field test of Caché and Ensemble 2017.1, including many new improvements.

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

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.

Hello,

We are sometimes asked for examples of how to do 3rd party SQL database selects/updates/inserts/stored procedures from an Ensemble SQL Business Operation.

In the attached file there are 4 sample Ensemble Operations that demonstrate four different types of transactions with an external SQL DB: