Article
· May 31, 2017 28m read
Cogs Library

Cogs Library

Over the next few months I will be releasing a number of open source libraries and tools to the Caché community.

Most of the code has evolved from previous production grade solutions over the years and I am collating it together under a single overarching library package that I am calling Cogs.

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Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

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With the release of Cache 2016.1, JSON support was re-architected and made part of the core object model with the creation of %Object and %Array classes, which allow you to create dynamic JSON enabled objects and arrays.

On a recent demonstration I was working on, I had the need to create a REST web service that returned a JSON representation of a persistent object. After searching for methods that would allow me to accomplish this, ultimately I found none, until now.

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There are several options how to deliver user interface(UI) for DeepSee BI solutions. The most common approaches are:

  • use native DeepSee Dashboards, get web UI in Zen and deliver it in your web apps.
  • use DeepSee REST API, get and build your own UI widgets and dashboards.

The 1st approach is good because of the possibility to build BI dashboards without coding relatively fast, but you are limited with preset widgets library which is expandable but with a lot of development efforts.

The 2nd provides you the way to use any comprehensive js framework (D3, Highcharts, etc) to visualize your DeepSee data, but you need to code widgets and dashboards on your own.

Today I want to tell you about yet another approach which combines both listed above and provides Angular based web UI for DeepSee Dashboards - DeepSee Web library.

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Index to Articles

Published 2018-05-11 Last edit -

Hi All

I this article I detail some strategic issues that a new development UI will need to address - these are the ones that I can think of now - others may come to light during this journey.

See the webinar by Eduard Lebedyuk here from the last Global Summit describing modern web development and Caché

And, as always, if I have missed something please comment....

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Introduction

The field test of Caché 2016.2 has been available for quite some time and I would like to focus on one of the substantial features that is new in this version: the document data model. This model is a natural addition to the multiple ways we support for handling data including Objects, Tables and Multidimensional arrays. It makes the platform more flexible and suitable for even more use cases.

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Developing a Full-Stack JavaScript web app with Caché requires you to bring together the right building blocks. In the previous part, we created a basic front-end React application. In the second part of this article series I will show how to choose the right back-end technology for your application. You will see Caché allows you to use many different approaches to link your front-end to your Caché server, depending on your application's needs. In this part we will set up a back-end with Node.js/QEWD and CSP/REST. In the next part we will enhance our basic web app and connect it to Caché using these technologies.

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So, one day you're working away at WidgetsDirect, the leading supplier of widget and widget accessories, when your boss asks you to develop the new customer facing portal to allow the client base to access the next generation of Widgets..... and he wants you to use Angular 1.x to read into the department's Caché server.

There's only one problem: You've never used Angular, and don't know how to make it talk to Caché.

This guide is going to walk through the process of setting up a full Angular stack which communicates with a Caché backend using JSON over REST.

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Article
· Jan 22 2m read
Getting JSON from SQL

Did you know that you can get JSON data directly from your SQL tables?

Let me introduce you to 2 useful SQL functions that are used to retrieve JSON data from SQL queries - JSON_ARRAY and JSON_OBJECT.
You can use those functions in the SELECT statement with other types of select items, and they can be specified in other locations where an SQL function can be used, such as in a WHERE clause

The JSON_ARRAY function takes a comma-separated list of expressions and returns a JSON array containing those values.

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The Lo-Code Challenge

Imagine the scene. You are working happily at Widgets Direct, the internet's premier retailer of Widgets and Widget Accessories. Your boss has some devastating news, some customers might not be fully happy with their widgets, and we need a helpdesk application to track these complaints. To makes things interesting, he wants this with a very small code footprint and challenges you to deliver an application in less than 150 lines of code using InterSystems IRIS. Is this even possible?

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Developing a Full-Stack JavaScript web app with Caché requires you to bring together the right building blocks. Previously, I outlined the basic steps to install and connect Node.js to Caché and make it's powerful multi-model database capabilites available for use with Node.js. You can use Caché as a NoSQL-, document- (with unique key-level access!), SQL- and object-database with Node.js. When developing JavaScript applications, you'll see how powerful this combination is and makes Caché a perfect fit for Node.js.

In the first part of this article series I will show how to get started with the React framework, one of the most popular frameworks currently taking over front-end development. In the next parts you'll learn how to connect a basic web app to a Caché back-end.

You'll see, it's very easy to get started with this technology - you can even compare the amount of basic knowledge you need to COS because you only need to know a few basic concepts to start!

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Programming and languages

Being a programmer nowadays is basically the geek version of being a polyglot. Of course, most of us here, in the InterSystems Community, “speak ObjectScript”. Howeever, I believe this wasn’t the first language for many people. For instance, I had never heard about it prior to getting the appropriate training at Innovatium.

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Recently, a partner company started to develop an Angular client for their Cache application. Together, we decided to leverage the power of Caché dynamic objects to exchange JSON encoded data between client and server parts. However, we realized that currently there is a gap in Cache JSON implementation that prevents simple use of traditional registered and persistent classes to exposed their data with the same ease as with XML. I wrote a small JSON adapter, that does the job and bridgers the gap. It's purpose is simple expose data described by a regular Cache class in a one-to-one fashion to a %DynamicObject. On the other hand, when a serialized JSON data comes in, it can be easily deserialized into dynamic object and subsequently bound to regular class by the newly created adapter.

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Article
· Sep 21, 2016 7m read
REST in Pieces

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

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Article
· Mar 31, 2023 3m read
Using JSON in IRIS

Saw the other day an article with the usage of the %ZEN package when working with JSON and decided to write an article describing a more modern approach. At some recent point, there was a big switch from using %ZEN.Auxiliary.* to dedicated JSON classes. This allowed to work with JSONs more organically.

Thus, at this point there are basically 3 main classes to work with JSON:

  • %Library.DynamicObject - provides a simple and efficient way to encapsulate and work with standard JSON documents. Also, there is a possibility instead of writing the usual code for creating an instance of a class like
set obj = ##class(%Library.DynamicObject).%New()

it is possible to use the following syntax

set obj = {}
  • %Library.DynamicArray - provides a simple yet efficient way to encapsulate and work with standard JSON arrays. With arrays you can use the same approach as with objects, meaning that yu can either create an instance of the class
set array = ##class(%DynamicArray).%New()

or you can do it by using brackets []

set array = []
  • %JSON.Adaptor is a means for mapping ObjectScript objects (registered, serial or persistent) to JSON text or dynamic entities.
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Article
· Jun 4, 2020 1m read
Easy data import into IRIS

Sometimes you need quickly and easily import data into IRIS. For this, an IRIS import manager has been developed.

This application allows you to import JSON data and also provides a really simple interface for transferring data from MongoDB collections to IRIS globals. It has never been so easy.

Let's look at examples.

Import JSON

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Article
· Jun 25, 2020 12m read
Backport %JSON.* to Caché

Attention:

This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Full backport from IRIS for Windows (x86-64) 2020.1 (Build 215U) Mon Mar 30 2020 20:14:33 EDT

IRIS brought us an excellent %JSON.Package
It is an essential component of the Project Manager (ZPM)
This backport makes it available also in Caché and builds a base to eventually backport also ZPM.

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