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#InterSystems IRIS

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InterSystems IRIS is a Complete Data Platform
InterSystems IRIS gives you everything you need to capture, share, understand, and act upon your organization’s most valuable asset – your data.
As a complete platform, InterSystems IRIS eliminates the need to integrate multiple development technologies. Applications require less code, fewer system resources, and less maintenance.

Article
· Feb 24, 2024 2m read
The bewitched line terminator

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

  • CR+LF is typical for Windows
  • LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
  • CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

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Article
· Feb 22, 2024 4m read
IRIS 2024.1 Preview - New Feature

There is an interesting new feature in the recently announced 2024.1 preview, JSON_TABLE. JSON_TABLE is one of a family of functions introduced by the 2016 version of the SQL Standard (ISO Standard, published in early 2017). It allows for JSON values to be mapped to columns and queried using SQL. JSON_TABLE is valid in the FROM clause of some SQL statements.

The syntax of JSON_TABLE is quite large, allowing for exceptional conditions where the provided JSON values don't match expectations, nested structures and so on.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

To remove InterSystems products installed on your Windows system, use Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel (in Windows 10, select Apps from Windows Settings).

Since we will be making changes to the system, you will need to log in as a user with administrator privileges.

1) Log in to the system as an administrator.

2) From the system tray, exit the launcher of the InterSystems product instance you want to uninstall (click launcher → exit).

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Article
· Jan 29, 2024 12m read
Creating custom login pages with %CSP.Login

The %CSP.Login class is the utility class provided by InterSystems IRIS to do custom login pages. If you want to control your IRIS application authentication UI, you must extend %CSP.Login and override some methods according to your needs. This article is going to detail those methods and what you can do with them. In addition to that, you will get an explanation of the delegated authentication mechanism provided by ZAUTHENTICATE.mac routine.

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Introduction

Not so long ago, I came across the idea of using Python Class Definition Syntax to create IRIS classes on the InterSystems Ideas Portal. It caught my attention since integrating as many syntaxes as possible gives visibility to InterSystems’s products for programmers with experience in many languages.

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Article
· Sep 18, 2023 7m read
Vectors support, well almost

Nowadays so much noise around LLM, AI, and so on. Vector databases are kind of a part of it, and already many different realizations for the support in the world outside of IRIS.

Why Vector?

  • Similarity Search: Vectors allow for efficient similarity search, such as finding the most similar items or documents in a dataset. Traditional relational databases are designed for exact match searches, which are not suitable for tasks like image or text similarity search.
  • Flexibility: Vector representations are versatile and can be derived from various data types, such as text (via embeddings like Word2Vec, BERT), images (via deep learning models), and more.
  • Cross-Modal Searches: Vectors enable searching across different data modalities. For instance, given a vector representation of an image, one can search for similar images or related texts in a multimodal database.

And many other reasons.

So, for this pyhon contest, I decided to try to implement this support. And unfortunately I did not manage to finish it in time, below I'll explain why.

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Interacting with Users in the Terminal: A Guide to Using %Library.Prompt in IRIS

Have you ever wondered how commands like ^DATABASE engage users in the terminal? Or perhaps you're writing an automation routine and want ways to specify options directly from the terminal. Thankfully, the %Library.Prompt class in IRIS offers a straightforward way to do so!

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Hi Devs!

Recently I was impressed by @Daniel.Pasco's article where he shares also how he uses terminal aliases.

Terminal aliases is a very powerful tool for developers and sys admins if you often need to call some cumbersome terminal expressions and make it shorter and cleaner. Here is the documentation.
Yes!

But what about Docker environments? What if you are fan of Docker dev environments but also want to keep using your favorite aliases with Docker as well?

Turned out it is very possible.

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Hello Community,

SQL language remains the most practical way to retrieve information stored in a database.

The JSON format is very often used in data exchange.

It is therefore common to seek to obtain data in JSON format from SQL queries.

Below you will find simple examples that can help you meet this need using ObjectScript and Python code.

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Do you ever spend an age entering criteria in the message viewer page, trying to find a message just to realise you're in the wrong instance of IRIS?

Or get lost in a sea of message tabs struggling to spot that Visual Trace page your were JUST looking at?

Well, have you tried the IRIS WHIZ browser extension and its suite of tools designed to help you avoid such unpleasantness?

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Hi all,

When is a Developer Community post not a Developer Community post? When it's just a few sentences wrapped around a link to InterSystems documentation! And what better way to finish up 2021 than by telling you about something cool that's been available since v2020.3? As the ball drops in Times Square, curl up with this:

Repeating Previous Commands

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Hi, developers!

Currently, I'm working on a project that requires highly dynamic event management. In the context of the Java programming language, my first instinct should be to opt for the "Observer Pattern", which is an approach to managing interactions between objects by establishing a notification mechanism. It allows multiple observers to react to changes in the state of a subject autonomously, promoting code flexibility and modularity. If you are not familiar with this design pattern, check out Wikipedia to find more information about it.


While it's natural and commonly used in certain programming languages as Java and C++, in ObjectScript, it's quite a different story.

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Article
· Jan 19, 2024 4m read
Querying Dynamic Data using ASQ

IRIS 2023.3.0 ASQ

Abstract Set Query, ASQ, is a super set of JSON Path Language, JPL, which was first introduced by the 2016 ISO SQL Standard. JPL is only defined within the context of SQL. In 2023.3, we introduced classes that implement ASQ. It works on any implementation of %Library.AbstractSet. The complete syntax for ASQ will be documented later. This is just a quick introduction to a few of its features. This implementation comes with a nice utility as well. You will know it when you see it!

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If the system does not stop for 24 hours, old journal files will be deleted at 0:30 according to the "Journal file deletion settings".

A possible cause of journal files remaining that are older than the "Journal file deletion settings" is that there are transactions that remain open.

In that case, you will be able to delete the journal file by searching for processes executing transactions and finalizing the transactions.

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The ideal number of table permissions to assign for your users is zero. Permissions should be granted upon sign-in based on the application used for access. For web applications, we have a simple way of doing this by appointing application roles, matching roles, and required resources in the System Management Portal.

ODBC and JDBC connections present a different problem, however, especially when third-party applications are involved. As providers of an ERP system, our customers often wish to be able to employ various software packages to integrate with or report on their data. Many of these programs are capable of running any kind of query. Yet, letting them do that can be devastating to a customer’s data.

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Article
· Nov 27, 2023 4m read
What about DMN?

A few months ago, I faced a significant challenge: streamlining the handling of business logic in our application. My goal was to extract the business logic from the code and hand it over to analysts. Dealing with a multitude of rules could easily result in a code littered with countless "if" statements, especially if the coder lacked an understanding of cyclomatic complexity. Such code becomes a source of pain for those working with it—difficult to write, test, and develop.

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IRIS can use a KMS (Key Managment Service) as of release 2023.3. Intersystems documentation is a good resource on KMS implementation but does not go into details of the KMS set up on the system, nor provide an easily followable example of how one might set this up for basic testing.

The purpose of this article is to supplement the docs with a brief explanation of KMS, an example of its use in IRIS, and notes for setup of a testing system on AWS EC2 RedHat Linux system using the AWS KMS. It is assumed in this document that the reader/implementor already has access/knowledge to set up an AWS EC2 Linux system running IRIS (2023.3 or later), and that they have proper authority to access the AWS KMS and AWS IAM (for creating roles and polices), or that they will be able to get this access either on their own or via their organizations Security contact in charge of their AWS access.

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Article
· Jan 21, 2024 1m read
Debugging a crashing container

I have been struggling with a docker run command that kept crashing, the error message was too generic to point me to the right direction.

Since the container is shut down after the failure, I was unable to login to it in order to figure out the problem.

I had to run the container in a way that I'll be able to log into it before it crashed, so I found the adding -u false prevents the docker run command to run the iris session IRIS and the container stayed up and running. then I was able to log into it using:

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Last Friday November 17 suddenly ran into an error where ZPM would issue an error saying:

ERROR! Object open failed because 'Name' key value of 'xx' was not found

I googled but found no specific help. Step by step I was able to conclude that:

  1. This is the error message for error 5770, also known as $$$KeyValueNotFoundOpen.

  2. In objectscript, this error can be raised by calls to NameOpen, where 'Name' is the first quoted part in the error message.

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