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.

12 34
6 1.5K

or "Didn't you say you would cover Persistent Objects in Part 5, Chris?"

Yes, that was the plan. This is a pretty important topic, so it get's its own Article

Up until now, we've display widget JSON that has been created by a basic loop. Clearly this isn't of much value. Now we have our stack connected together, and we can see that the data is flowing to the Welcome page, it's time to complete the stack and start feeding our service from "real" data.

2 4
0 1.5K

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....

13 13
2 1.4K
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.

17 38
4 1.4K

In this article I'll describe how to set up web services and/or REST services using EWD 3.

Since EWD 3 is designed to be modular, you can construct the environment that exactly meets your needs, but for much of the time you'll probably find that the pre-built EWD 3 ewd-xpress super-module does most of what you need because it hooks together all the core EWD 3 and other building-blocks you'll need:

4 1
1 1.3K
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.
10 5
2 1.3K

At the end of our last lesson, we ended with our page displaying a nice (but garish) Angular Material Toolbar, and our Widget data displaying in a list of Material cards. Our page feels a bit static, and we already know that the large number of Widgets that we will be dealing with will not be especially usable on a static list. What can we do to help?

3 0
0 1.2K

How can you allow computers to trust one another in your absence while maintaining security and privacy?

“A Dry Martini”, he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
"Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1953


OAuth helps to separate services with user credentials from “working” databases, both physically and geographically. It thereby strengthens the protection of identification data and, if necessary, helps you comply with the requirements of countries' data protection laws.

With OAuth, you can provide the user with the ability to work safely from multiple devices at once, while "exposing" personal data to various services and applications as little as possible. You can also avoid taking on "excess" data about users of your services (i.e. you can process data in a depersonalized form).

7 1
5 1.2K

Foreword

InterSystems IRIS versions 2022.2 and newer feature the ability to authenticate to a REST API using JSON web tokens (JWTs). This feature enhances security by limiting where and how often passwords transfer over the network in addition to setting an expiration time on access.

The goal of this article is to serve as a tutorial on how to implement a mock REST API using InterSystems IRIS and lock access to it behind JWTs.

10 0
6 1K

This series of articles aims to address the following topics:

  • Creation of a web application based on REST pages;
  • Overview of some tools for tracing (debugging) HTTP requests;
  • Switching from hyperevents to... hyperevents;
  • Integration with jQuery File Upload;
  • Conversion of JSON from the {id:1,parentId:1} format to the {id:1,children:[{}]} format for tree visualization;
  • Integration with jQuery EasyUI (using datagrid and tree as examples);
  • Other topics.

5 1
1 938
Article
· Jan 12, 2022 12m read
JSON Schema applied to InterSystems IRIS

The JSON is a data document free of types and validation rules. However, in some scenarios it is important that the JSON document has type and business rules validation, especially in interoperability scenarios. This article demonstrates how you can leverage a market-defined JSONSchema technology that is open for everyone to use and do advanced validations.

8 3
2 921

Index to Articles

Hi All

It's been 6 weeks since my original article sad
- - - - -but I have been busy on this project

I have been looking at/thinking about a replacement for ZEN for around 12 months but only really started in depth 4 months ago.
Also been in IT for long enough that I can "get a feel" for a product/technology and make decisions accordingly without going into great detail.
Any new technology has a learning curve and I don't want to waste time and effort on something that won't fly.
And, as always, I am looking to minimise the learning curve as I want to concentrate on delivering business benefit.

15 3
1 912

a.k.a.. "The World of Widgets Returns!" or "Paternity leave damages Instructional Series momentum"

In our last lesson, we combined 2 separate classes to appear as the same property. We now have the ability to Update our Widget catalog, but what if we want to Create a Widget? Thankfully, we've already done 90% of what we need, just by implementing Edits

0 0
0 865

Let's imagine if you would like to write some real web application, for instance, some simple clone of medium.com. Such sort of application can be written using any different language on the backend side, or with any framework on the frontend side. So many ways to do the same application, and you can look at this project. Which offers a bunch of frontends and backends realizations for exactly the same application. And you can easily mix them, any chosen frontend should work with any backend.

Let me introduce the same application realization for InterSystems IRIS on a backend side.

6 3
1 768

In our last lesson, we added some formatting and validation to our Edit Widget form. So, now we are ready to add the ability to add new Widgets to our application. However, the great Widget Wars have come to an abrupt end, as Widget Direct has purchased its biggest competitor, WorldWideWidgets. In order to maintain some continuity, we need to display their catalog on our new application.

2 0
0 731
Article
· Feb 18, 2021 2m read
Basic JSON Compare

Hi Dev Community

I thought i would share a little method I knocked together to traverse and compare 2 JSON objects for basic equivilance. I'm currently working on some data migration, and wanted a basic sanity check to validate that the JSON output is basically equivliant between the old and new, excluding a few things like timestamps.

It's a basic little recurvsive method, that will bubble up any differences over a nested structure. It's very low tech, as that's all I need it to do, but I thought it might be useful for others?

1 5
0 717
Article
· Jul 31, 2017 5m read
Introduction to QEWD Micro-Services

In my previous posting about the new support in QEWD for JSON Web Token (JWT) support, I mentioned that it was a key step in enabling Micro-Service support in QEWD. In this post I'll give some background to how they work and the thinking behind them.

If you haven't heard about Micro-Services and/or want to learn more, there's lots of information available if you do a Google Search. Here's a good starting point:

https://smartbear.com/learn/api-design/what-are-microservices/

3 3
0 671
Article
· May 1, 2020 1m read
Code sample to concatenate JSON arrays

ObjectScript doesn't include any built-in method for appending one JSON dynamic array to another. Here's a code snippet I use that's equivalent to the JavaScript concat() method.

Call it with any number of arguments to concatenate them into a new array. If an argument is a dynamic array, its elements will be added. Otherwise the argument itself will be added.

5 2
2 666

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.

8 8
3 664
Article
· Jul 21, 2020 1m read
Snapshot to JSON

This is a sample to use %JSON.Adaptor class available in IRIS to produce a snapshot of your object.

The sample consists of 2 classes that are variations of what was known in Caché/SAMPLES as Sample.Person.
Be aware that the possibilities are limited by %JSON.Adapter and how you make use of it.

Once in place, you create some test data by Populate().
You select an object and take a snapshot.
You apply changes to your object and take another snapshot.
And see the difference.

BINGO!

10 0
0 638