Hi,

InterSystems IRIS has long supported the obvious translation functions required to for converting to upper or lowercase to enforce case-insensitive string comparison (e.g. in ObjectScript with $zconvert) and sorting (e.g. with SQL collation functions, not to be confused with NLS collation). Customers in international contexts have at times used custom workarounds to also treat accent insensitivity or even more advanced normalization duct tape. We’re looking to address such use cases at the system and SQL level to increase convenience for this international audience, which is well represented on the Developer Community.

1 5
0 262
Discussion
· Sep 28, 2020
%Status usage in ObjectScript

Hi developers!

Want to discuss with you the case of %Status.

If you familiar with ObjectScript you know what is it. I'd love to hear the history of the case why it had appeared in ObjectScript but it turned out that almost every system/library classmethods return %Status and there is a whole set of tools to deal with it.

What is does it gives you the responsibility to check the value or %Status of every system method you call.

E.g. if you save the data of the persistent class, you should never call like this:

do obj.%Save()

you need to call:

set sc=obj.%Save()

if $$$ISERR(sc) do // something or quit.

1 19
0 967
Discussion
· Sep 21, 2020
Unit Testing Naming Convention

Hi Developers!

Recently we discussed the naming convention on packages we deploy and even made some choices.

Here I want to have a conversation on the naming convention for unit tests.

Of course, we wish every good library has unit tests. Here is the documentation and some good articles(one, two, three) regarding it on the Developer Community.

Let's decide on the naming of UnitTests packages?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will all start with the UnitTest package name.

E.g. if your library's class name is:

johndoe.lib.class

The related unit test class will be:

UnitTest.johndoe.lib.class

What about folders?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will live separately from source classes, e.g. in /tests directory.

Here is the example of a repository with unit tests that are named and placed according to the proposal.

What do you think?

5 6
0 315

The use of Source Code Control systems in development is important. And there are a few systems known in the world, like GIT, SVN (Subversion), Perforce, Mercurial. Where the most popular nowadays is the git. Using it is very useful in many cases, but mostly it depends on the code as text, which can be compared between commits, branches, or versions of releases and so on.

1 0
0 291

Hello All,

I have been using IRIS / Ensemble for over a decade and appreciate lot of it's functionalities and features, however besides having a UI of 80's era (which doesn't bother me), what I believe where IRIS is lacking is lack of out of the box connectors (services/operations).

If we look at IRIS's competitors for eg Mulesoft, Talend, Boomi they all have hundreds of pre-built connectors for major applications like Salesforce, SAP etc and cloud services like Azure, AWS etc to store and retrieve information and data.

0 2
0 431

Hi Devs!

A few months ago I raised a discussion on the naming convention for ZPM modules.

And you free to put your name or your organization name for the packages you want to have your personal or company's brand.

But if you contribute to community, we suggested to have "community." package for all such libraries.

But the name is too long.

2 19
1 465

I'm not sure what the purpose of this is, but the Management Console causes the browser to refresh periodically. If you're in a form or an editor such as the DTL or Routing Rule editors, you may lose work unless you save frequently. This did not occur in Caché 2018 and earlier releases.

I've had a couple of incidents where I've created a number of rules in the DTL editor, answered the phone or stepped away for a few minutes, then come back to find any work since the last save erased.

I've noticed this in both 2019 and 2020 releases of IRIS.

Heads up!

0 4
1 449

Hi,

we're planning some work on our SQL Query Plan functionality for a future release of InterSystems IRIS and are interested to hear how you're using them today, or what'd keep you from using them. Rather than try and fit everything in a rigid survey, I thought a simple thread on our beloved DC might also reveal some use patterns that we support or could do a better job on.

3 7
0 285

Hi Developers!

Often we need to use relatively small arrays with constants, static arrays in algorithms, etc where we need to do something with each element of an array. There are several ways to deal with it in ObjectSctipt.

Previously I used to use globals, locals, PPG for this but not so long time ago figured out that %List is a way too handy.

Indeed, suppose we have an array of months and need to set up and use it in our code.

2 15
1 573

Hello, InterSystems community!

Lately, you have probably heard of the new InterSystems Package Manager - ZPM. If you're familiar with it or with such package managers as NPM, Dep, pip/PyPI, etc. or just know what is it all about -- this question is for you! The question I want to arise is actually a system design question, or, in other words, "how should ZPM implement it".

4 14
0 325

Hi Community!

Sometimes I meet a method which accepts 10+ parameters.

And often I need only the 8th parameter to pass. And I call the method something like:

do ##class(Some.Feature).Method(,,,,,,,"flag")

And I don't like this method when I call it like this cause, you know, often I just miss the number of commas and raise some other flag I wanted.

How do you avoid this situations?

If you meet such a code, how do you call it and sure that you didn't miss the number of ","?

What is a good number of parameters in a method and f you need to pass more parameters in a method what do you do?

3 27
1 1.5K

Hi Developers!

InterSystems IRIS stores everything in globals and if we use ObjectScript classes to persist data class documents globals it uses in storage. But if you use globals for calculations, temporary storages, for special indexes or for some other purposes - how do you document it?

Possible options which come to my mind:

1. Macro

#define Array ^MyGlobal

usage:

s $$$Array(1)=1

2. Class parameter

Parameter Array ="^MyGlobal";

Usage:

0 3
0 325

Hi Community!

There are two general ways to execute arbitrary SQL in serverside ObjectScript code: EmbeddedSQL and ObjectScript SQL a.k.a. Dynamic SQL.

E.g. if we want to get the value of the property of instance with a certain ID using SQL we can do:

&sql(SELECT Name INTO :name FROM Sample.Person WHERE ID=1)

write name

Same result with %SQL.Statement:

set rs=##class(%SQL.Statement).%ExecDirect(,"SELECT Name as name FROM Sample.Person where ID=1")
  do rs.%Next()
  write rs.name

1 2
0 907

Hi guys!

Suppose you developed a tool, framework, library on InterSystems ObjectScript for InterSystems Data Platform, share it via Open Exchange and want people to install it.

What is the best strategy if it is a library and supposed to be called from different namespaces?

Here are the following thoughts:

1. Tool's developer should be able to use globals to read/store data the tool needs.

2. Tool's consumer should be confident, that the thing he/she installs will not harm the application's data.

3. A tool should be callable from any application's namespace.

4. Tool's installation(in general) should not request manual security changes (e.g. grant the write access to IRISLIB) and %YourClass is not an option.

5. It's easy to uninstall the tool - just delete the namespace/database (maybe delete some web-apps too).

0 10
0 416