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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.

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.

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I usually receive complains from our customers about the BPL and DTL web pages automatic refreshes, it's a common problem among newbies users but for veteran developers too, they forget to save the changes regularly and automatically the web page is reloaded, losing all the work done.

Maybe an autosave would fix this problem that produces a deep feeling of hate and resentment against InterSystems technology among our customers. I've added an idea in our portal, so feel free to vote it!

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Discussion
· Mar 21, 2025
Transforms in COS over DTL

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!

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Discussion
· Nov 17, 2021
Code Golf - Encoder

We need to send some coordinates to a spaceship through a laser beam.
To do that we have to encode it, and beam it out into space.
Your mission is to implement the encoder with a compression standard.
As usual shortest solution wins.

Task

You will receive a string of comma-separated integers and you will return a new string of comma-separated integers and sequence descriptors.

Input

"0,2,4,5,5,5,5,5,3,4,5"

Output

"0-4/2,5*5,3-5"

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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.

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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?

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Today we have an unusual code golf: build a program (using only printable ASCII characters, tabs and newlines) that prints out exactly the characters in the printable ASCII space (characters 32 to 126) that don't appear in your program's source code (in any order, however many times you want).

As usual, the goal is to produce the shortest code to do this.

My (admittedly not very good, but does the job!) entry:

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Hi everyone!

If you are working with IRIS 2021+ and you remove all of the built in entries for External Language Servers, there is an unexpected consequence that may prevent you from running an installer to upgrade your version of IRIS. This does appear to be a bug which has been raised with WRC, however there are some people that may have recently removed these settings and then will soon be upgrading their environment and could face this same issue.

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Let's consider you would like to efficiently store your historical data in a similar structure than the one used for your current data, but without sharing the same physical storage (ie : not in the same global). What is the most efficient way to do it ?

Below a simple class of your current data :

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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.

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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.

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Discussion
· Oct 8, 2021
Code Golf: Just add water...

Have you ever seen those vaccum compressed towels, that look like a pill and after you add water became a towel?

That's our challenge for today. As usual shortest solution wins.

Task

You will receive an integer number and you will return a new number where each digit is repeated a number of times equals to its value.

Input:

42

Output:

444422

Note:

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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.

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Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternate meanings. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities. Wikipedia

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Discussion
· Apr 10, 2025
Vector Embeddings Feedback

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.

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Hi Community,

A long time ago, I create a package for a String datatype that works with Regular Expression. It is quite a simple solution.

This can work well with packages like the OpenAPI-Suite, where you can then use the "Regular Expression String" as the type for properties of the validator objects where the Swagger contained a Regular Expression.

I am proposing we start a common package of datatypes for use. The package name to use can be provided by the admins.

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Discussion
· Sep 16, 2022
txt2img
Several models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and StableDiffusion, became available recently. All these models generate digital images from natural language descriptions. The most interesting one, in my opinion, is StableDiffusion which is open source - released barely a few weeks ago. There's now an entire community trying to leverage it for various use cases.
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Images for other languages are often build using multistage build process.

What about InterSystems IRIS?

Consider this Dockerfile:

FROM irishealth-community:2020.4.0.524.0 AS builder

# Load code into USER and compile
# Adjust settings, etc.

FROM irishealth-community:2020.4.0.524.0

# replace in standard kit with what we modified in first stage

COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/iris.cpf /usr/irissys/.
COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/mgr/IRIS.DAT /usr/irissys/mgr/.
COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/mgr/user/IRIS.DAT /usr/irissys/mgr/user/.

The advantage of this approach is the image size.
The disadvantage is that on a final stage developer must know/remember all the modified places in the builder image.

But otherwise is this approach OK for InterSystems IRIS?
Have anyone tried to build IRIS images this way?

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