I joined InterSystems less than a year ago. Diving into ObjectScript and IRIS was exciting, but also full of small surprises that tripped me up at the beginning. In this article I collect the most common mistakes I, and many new colleagues, make, explain why they happen, and show concrete examples and practical fixes. My goal is to help other new developers save time and avoid the same bumps in the road.

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Starting out with ObjectScript, it is really exciting, but it can also feel a little unusual if you're used to other languages. Many beginners trip over the same hurdles, so here are a few "gotchas" you'll want to watch out for. (Also few friendly tips to avoid them)


NAMING THINGS RANDOMLY

We have all been guilty of naming something Test1 or MyClass just to move on quickly. But once your project grows, these names become a nightmare.

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Hi Community,

We’re excited to share a brand-new Instruqt tutorial:

🧑‍🏫 RAG using InterSystems IRIS Vector Search

This hands-on lab walks you through building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot powered by InterSystems IRIS Vector Search. You’ll see how vector search can be leveraged to deliver up-to-date and accurate responses, combining the strengths of IRIS with generative AI.

✨ Why try it?

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Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

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Article
· Sep 16 1m read
Reviews on Open Exchange - #55

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

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Article
· Sep 4 4m read
IRIS in Docker for beginners

The article was motivated by the 2025 September Article Bounty
***************************************************************


The principle of Docker is just convincing to me.

  • Get a sandbox where you play and try whatever you want/need to do
  • Once done. You drop it without leaving traces in your working environment

This was the technical base for me to run about 700 reviews in OEX
with almost no side effects (except those caused by myself).

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Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

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Ready to elevate your Business Intelligence game?

We've got an engaging video, perfect for all skill levels.

Discover how to get started with IRIS BI, optimize cube performance, and drive analytics adoption. Plus, get a sneak peek at what's next!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ekjzny8zj98
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

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I am truly excited to continue my "InterSystems for Dummies" series of articles, and today, we want to tell you everything about one of the most powerful features we have for interoperability.

Hey, even if you have already had a go, we plan to take a really close look at how to get the most out of them and make our production even better.

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Table of Contents

  1. Purpose of the article
  2. What containers are and why they make sense with IRIS
     2.1 Containers and images in a nutshell
     2.2 Why containers are useful for developers
     2.3 Why IRIS works well with Docker
  3. Prerequisites
  4. Installing the InterSystems IRIS image
     4.1 Using Docker Hub
     4.2 Pulling the image
  5. Running the InterSystems IRIS image
     5.1 Starting an IRIS container
     5.2 Checking container status
     5.3 Executing code in the container terminal
     5.4 Accessing the IRIS Management Portal
     5.5 Connecting the container to VS Code
     5.6 Stopping or removing the container
     5.7 Setting a specific password with a bind mount
     5.8 Using durable %SYS volumes
      5.8.1 What gets stored with durable %SYS
      5.8.2 How to enable durable %SYS
  6. Using Docker Compose
     6.1 Docker Compose example
     6.2 Running Docker Compose
  7. Using a Dockerfile to run custom source code
     7.1 Dockerfile example
     7.2 Docker Compose example
     7.3 Understanding layers, image tagging and build vs. run time
     7.4 Source code and init script
     7.5 Building the image with Dockerfile
     7.6 Running instructions in the containerized IRIS terminal
  8. Conclusion and what’s next

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Hey folks! Having recently onboarded to InterSystems, I realized that despite having a totally free and awesome Community Edition, it's not super clear how to get it. I decided to write up a guide highlighting all the different ways you can access the Community Edition of InterSystems IRIS:

Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition as a Container

Working with a containerized instance of the Community Edition is the recommended approach for folks who are new to developing on InterSystems IRIS, and in my opinion it's the most straightforward. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition can be found on DockerHub; if you have an InterSystems SSO account, you can also find it in the InterSystems Container Registry.

In either case, you'll want to pull the image you want using the docker CLI:

docker pull intersystems/iris-community:latest-em
// or
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

Next, you'll need to start the container: In order to interact with IRIS from outside the container (for example, to use the management portal) you'll need to publish some ports. The following command will run the IRIS Community Edition container with the superserver and web server ports published; note that you can't have anything else running that depends on ports 1972 or 52773!

docker run --name iris -d --publish 1972:1972 --publish 52773:52773 intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

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I am working on a tool that configures an instance to use a common default routine database across all custom Namespaces. For instances that already have distinct default routine databases for their Namespaces, this would involve a step of merging over all code from the current default routine databases to the new "super" routine database. This should be done in such a way that only merges contents in the default routine database (not mapped databases) and is able to detect/exclude contents that already exist in the target database.

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Finishing my previous example for multiple IRIS instances, I tried
to compose a local single instance version. The step from the external
Python app to a version using embedded Python seemed to be obvious.
This was a wrong assumption, as some Python libraries just refused installation
into my local Windows-based environment.

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Article
· Sep 16 14m read
High Availability IAM

One of the recommendations when deploying InterSystems Technologies for production is to set up High Availability. The recommended API Manager for these InterSystems Technologies is the InterSystems API Manager (IAM). IAM (essentially Kong Gateway) has multiple deployment topologies.

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Question
· Sep 13
Ensemble query

Hi Team,

I've basic learning in Ensemble. I want to create a code as per following request. Please help in clearing following questions

We have a business process-AA. In this business process, we have onRequest method, here after performing some logic, I have to call a method ProcessAAlogic.

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In the previous article, we saw how to build a customer service AI agent with smolagents and InterSystems IRIS, combining SQL, RAG with vector search, and interoperability.

In that case, we used cloud models (OpenAI) for the LLM and embeddings.

This time, we’ll take it one step further: running the same agent, but with local models thanks to Ollama.

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Hello community.

I have a request from a client who wants to do the following.
Currently, they have a data upload process via FTP in which they have implemented a RecordMap to store the information of the CSV files that are uploaded to the FTP directory.
Now they want to have another directory so that it is ONLY executed through an external instruction, not when the file is uploaded to the directory.

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Hi folks!

Sometimes, when designing a class method and feeding it with more and more useful features, very soon the number of parameters can reach 10 and even more.

It becomes pretty difficult for users of useful methods to remember the position of the important parameter, and it is very easy to misuse the position and transfer the wrong value to the wrong parameter.

Here is an example of such a method (I asked GPT to create a method with 20 params):

ClassMethod GenerateReportWith20Params(
    pTitle As %String = "",
    pAuthor As %String = "",
    pDate As %String = "",            // e.g. 2025-09-03
    pCompany As %String = "",
    pDepartment As %String = "",
    pVersion As %String = "1.0",
    pFormat As %String = "pdf",       // pdf|html|docx
    pIncludeCharts As %Boolean = 1,
    pIncludeSummary As %Boolean = 1,
    pIncludeAppendix As %Boolean = 0,
    pConfidentiality As %String = "Public",
    pLanguage As %String = "en",
    pReviewers As %String = "",       // CSV, e.g. "Alice,Bob"
    pApprover As %String = "",
    pLogoPath As %String = "",
    pWatermarkText As %String = "",
    pColorScheme As %String = "default",
    pPageSize As %String = "A4",
    pOrientation As %String = "Portrait",
    pOutputPath As %String = "report.pdf"
) As %Status
{

// implementation
}

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Hi

I'm a newbie in productions and I've received the below business operation from a client that I need to include in a production,

So not sure if I'm supposed to create a new Business operation with a new name and select the class as below but then what's next and what should be the output type in X12 tab or if it should be type SCOSwarm.Message.SX3ScheduleResponse?

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Securing IRIS Integrations with Mutual TLS (mTLS): A Practical Guide

In today’s enterprise environments, secure communication between systems is not optional—it’s essential. Whether you're integrating InterSystems IRIS with cloud APIs, internal microservices, or third-party platforms, Mutual TLS (mTLS) offers a powerful way to ensure both ends of the connection are authenticated and encrypted.

This post walks through how to configure IRIS for mTLS and how to validate your certificates to avoid common pitfalls.

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