#InterSystems IRIS

Hi developers!

I'm testing vibecoding with ObjectScript and my silicon friend created a code-block that got me thinking "what's wrong"?

Here is the piece of code:

for i=0:1:(json.%Size()-1) {

set p = json.%Get(i)

if (p="value1")!(p="value2") {

quit 1
}

AI wanted to quit from a method with a return value. Good intention, but bad use of the command.

And ObjectScript compiler compiles this code with no error(?) (syntax linter in VSCode says it's a syntax, kudos @Brett Saviano ).

But in action, it produces <COMMAND>, of course.

Hello community!
I have a small challenge for you :)

One of customers is sending quite a lot of messages between interoperability components, which mix standard request content and streams representing serialized JSON objects. As these JSON streams can be quite long (but not too long, just couple hundreds of characters) they would appreciate if the JSON content of stream was displayed in a nice-to-read way, using syntax highlighting by message trace view.

Time for another round of code golf!

Develop a function that performs a two-step encryption process on a given string:

• First Step: Reverse Cipher

  • Reverse the entire input string.
  • Relocate the last character of the original string (now the first character of the reversed string) to the end.

• Second Step: Alphabetic Index Binary Encoding

  • For each alphabetic character, determine its zero-based index in the lowercase alphabet (a-z).
  • Replace odd-indexed characters with '1' and even-indexed characters with '0'.
  • Preserve non-alphabetic characters unchanged.

Example:

encrypt("Hello World!

Hi noble developers!

Have a question/discussion. Sometimes, while developing, we'd need to connect VSCode directly to a remote server (e.g., stage one) for debugging purposes. And after change back to local one. And then to remote again.

How do you perform this switching in VSCode in a convenient way?

I have several settings.json files (settings_local, settings_remote) which I put to a main settings.json when I need to make VSCode to connect to switch the connection:

Is it the best practice?

Hi,

We're working on new capabilities to help you build Agents and AI applications faster with InterSystems IRIS. In order to better understand which entry points and development methodologies would help you most, we've created this brief survey: Building AI solutions with InterSystems IRIS. 

Filling it in should not take much more than 5 minutes, and your feedback on this exciting topic will help us fine tune our designs and prioritize the right features.

Thanks in advance!
benjamin
 

Hi developers!

How do you debug implementation code in .impl classes of REST.API in InterSystems IRIS?

Especially if you don't have access to globals, so no things like: 

Set ^AAA="here we are"

not possible in this case.

Suppose I have the following signature of the REST.API method called as POST and containing JSON. :

Over the past several years, the InterSystems Developer Community has accumulated more than 1,000 open-source projects. Many of them serve as examples and learning materials — but a significant number have become useful tools, libraries, integrations, and real-world components used in production.

Some of these projects are mine, and like many community developers, I’ve seen the same recurring problem:

• It’s easy to create an open-source project.
• It’s hard to maintain, support, and develop it sustainably — especially without funding.

Writing code is one thing.
Supporting it for years, keeping up with new IRIS versions, building CI pipelines, writing documentation, fixing issues, reviewing PRs — all of this demands both time and motivation, and the biggest motivator is often financial support.

This is not a new challenge.
The global open-source world has faced this for decades and has developed various models to support OSS ecosystems.

I believe it’s time for the InterSystems community to start a discussion about adopting a similar model.

Hi, 

We very much appreciate the interest in the Developer Community for IRIS Vector Search and hope our technology has helped many of you build innovative applications or advanced your R&D efforts. With a dedicated index, integrated embeddings generation, and deep integration with our SQL engine now available in InterSystems IRIS, we're looking at the next frontier, and would love to hear your feedback on the technology to prioritize our investments.

It's been a while since the new UI for Productions and DTL was published as a preview and I would like to know your opinions about it.

WARNING: This is a personal opinion, totally personal and not related with InterSystems Corporation.

I'm going to start with the Interoperabilty screen:

Production screen:

The style is sober and without frills, following the line of cloud services design, I like it.

But, always a but...or maybe two:

In my opinion there is too much information, the left menu is superfluous, it's true that you can collapse it, but I don't want to do it each time that I use the

This anthropic article made me think of several InterSystems presentations and articles on the topic of data quality for AI applications. InterSystems is right that data quality is crucial for AI, but I imagined there would be room for small errors, but this study suggests otherwise. That small errors can lead to big hallucinations. What do you think of this? And how can InterSystems technology help?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

I know the next ones:

1. Place all different settings in environment variables. You have a different .env file for each environment, and you must add some code to Production for reading and setting these values. It's good for deploying into containers, but challenging for management when we have a large production. I mean, we have many settings that can vary depending on the environment: active flag, pool size, timeouts, and so on. Not only endpoints.

2. My own case.

This one's for those of you who feel that InterSystems tech makes your life easier... whether you’re working on integration projects, building innovative solutions, or evolving existing ones.

Hi all,
I needed to pick up the username from a set of credentials configured for a business operation in an interop production, and it turned out to take a few steps, so I'm sharing my method here, in the dual hope that someone has an easier way to do it, or failing that, that it is useful to someone.
Best,
Otto

I would like to know which are the best practices of using Streams in Interoperability messages.

I have always use %Stream.GlobalCharacter properties to hold a JSON, or a base64 document, when creating messages. This is fine and I can see the content in Visual Trace without doing anything, so I can check what is happening and resolve issues if I have, or reprocess messages if something went wrong, because I have the content.

But I think this is not the best way of using Streams.

Hello Community,

I'm currently planning a system upgrade from Caché (2018.1.8.766) to InterSystems IRIS (2024.1). The environment consists of one database server and three application servers connected via ECP.

I’m considering two possible upgrade approaches:

1. Upgrade the application servers to IRIS first.
   Since IRIS is expected to be backward-compatible with Caché over ECP, the database server would remain on Caché temporarily.
2. Upgrade the database server first,
   followed by upgrading the application servers, as they don’t store data.

Hi Developers!

There is a free ObjectScriptQuality tool for ObjectScript developers who upload solutions on GitHub. This tool helps developers validate ObjectScript code using a variety of rules, based on common code errors.

There are currently 16 rules in this tool, but there are definitely many more rules to consider when testing ObjectScript code.

Could you suggest any other rules to add to this tool?

Note: You can submit it as an idea on the InterSystems Ideas for the 2nd Idea-A-Thon contest.

Hi fellow developers!

Curious if you guys use CreatedAt and LastUpdated properties in your classes?

Created to stamp when the record was created and LastUpdated when it was last updated. Where it can be useful - almost everywhere )) I find it convenient in records sorting (e.g. by creation or last update), in sync (with other systems), and so on, for better analytics.

Do you use it all the time for all the classes?

If don't, why not? What do you use instead?

What property type do you use - %TimeStamp? %DateTime?

What is the best practice to have CreatedAt filled automatically during creation and LastUpdated on every successful save (guess it could be in %OnSave)?

Please share your experience /thoughts?

Hey everyone,

I'm diving deeper into Caché ObjectScript and would love to open a discussion around the most useful tips, tricks, and best practices you’ve learned or discovered while working with it.

Whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started, ObjectScript has its own set of quirks and powerful features—some well-documented, others hidden gems. I’m looking to compile a helpful set of ideas from the community.

Are you using Jupyter Notebooks with IRIS? Are you using the vscode-iris-jupyter-server VS Code extension for your notebooking? If so, please let me know either via direct message or with a comment on this post. I'd like to hear more about how our customers are working with tool specifically, and with data science more generally.

Thanks!

If anyone has a custom checklist of tasks that must absolutely be done when doing this upgrade to make sure everything is included and nothing is lost or destroyed, we would greatly appreciate it? We have the generic checklist provided on the support websites but we run custom build classes, ftp, tcp-ip, batch, etc.

Thanks,

Jonathan Harris

Hi devs!

What is the best way to return JSON in IRIS for a GET request in a REST app?

This is how I do it now:

ClassMethod GetAllPersons() As %Stream.Object
{
    d ..%SetContentType("application/json")
    Set rset = ##class(dc.Sample.Person).ExtentFunc()

    set stream=##class(%Stream.TmpCharacter).%New()
    d stream.Write("[")
    if rset.%Next() {
        Set person = ##class(dc.Sample.Person).%OpenId(rset.ID)
        Do person.%JSONExportToStream(.stream)
    }
    While rset.%Next() {
        d stream.Write(",")
        Set person = ##class(dc.Sample.Person).%OpenId(rset

I read the article by @Rodolfo Pscheidt:

https://community.intersystems.com/post/ollama-ai-iris

I forked his app and copied selected files from @Guillaume Rongier iris-rag-demo to make it containerized:

oliverwilms/ollama-ai-iris
 

I ran load_data.py and I got this output:

irisowner@e10968e4da42:/irisdev/app$ python3 load_data.py
Document ID: cbfa2f20-6627-407b-bbad-31722d18ca13
modules.json: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 349/349 [00:00<00:00, 778kB/s]
config_sentence_transformers.

I have written a new script for csv file export, which writes lines to a %Library.File file based on a SQL query.

The code is simplified into the following as 

try {
    // set up file as %Libary.File
    set f = ##class(%Library.File).%New()
    set f.Name = "export.csv"
    if (##class(%File).Exists(f.Name)) { $$$ThrowOnError(##class(%File).Delete(f.Name)) }
    $$$ThrowOnError(f.Open("WUN"))
    $$$ThrowOnError(f.

There is a list of numbers from 1 to 190.

AllList="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,.....,187,188,189,190"

There is a collection of sets of these values:

List(1)="3,5,6,7,9"
List(2)="1,2,6,9"
List(3)="5,8,9"
List(4)="2,4,6,8"
List(5)="4,7,9"

What is an elegant approach in Object Script to pick the least number of list items:

• List(1)
• List(5)
• List(n)

That together would cover as many numbers as possible from the AllList.

Interested in best coverage over efficiency.

I ask ChatGPT periodically to produce ObjectScript or plain MUMPS code for string manipulation, or for implementing known algorithms etc. Occasionally, it does make mistakes or uses non-existing class members but generally not that bad. Is there any tutorial on the subject of using AI for coding, ideally specifically for ObjectScript/MUMPS? Any AI productivity advice, or tricks you are using, or another AI flavor?

Thanks in advance,
Anna

Background

Embeddings is a new IRIS feature empowering the latest capability in AI semantic search.
This presents as a new kind of column on a table that holds vector data.
The embedding column supports search for another existing column of the same table.
As records are added or updated to the table, the supported column is passed through an AI model and the semantic signature is returned.
This signature information is stored as the vector for future search comparison.
Subsequently when search runs, a comparison of the stored signatures occurs without any further AI model processing overhead.

Hi All,

  After doing IRIS/Ensemble etc for 20 years I've come across a company who have very odd view, especially about DTL's and routers.

  They have convinced themselves to use COS for transforms (including HL7) and for routers (and one of their 3rd party providers agree!)

  Their reasons are; efficiency, compatibility, flexibility, power and re-usability.

  Of course these reasons are wrong!

• Efficiency, difference between 1-2 lines compared to a DTL/XML going to 3-4 lines (This also assumes the COS code is well written)
• Compatibility, surely less with COS as its subject to developer style?

Once upon a time in Ensemble Management Portal the pool size of each component (Business Host) within the production was displayed in the Production Configuration page.

This information was very useful, especially when a production have tens or hundreds of components.

Now days the pool size is no longer displayed in the Production Configuration page and to get the pool size you need to click in each and every host in your production.
What if you have hundreds of business hosts and you need to check the pool size of each? It's a nightmare!