Time travel is like visiting Paris. You can't just read the guide, you have to throw yourself into it. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get double the charges, and end up kissing complete strangers.

The Doctor

We are now going to travel through time, that is, we are going to see future and past dates and how to calculate them in different formats. The TARDIS doesn't wait, take the controls and hold on tight.

Hi Community,

to learn quickly and in total autonomy on IRIS, I offer you some links which can help you in this beautiful bicycle ride rich in discoveries:

Hi Developers!

I want to share with you the approach you can use working with Unit Testing which I personally find very convenient and robust.

Will not talk much here about Unit Testing, we have documentation, enough good articles on the topic not only on the Internet but here on Developers Community too, e.g. this one.

How can you manage the Unit Testing of your ZPM module?

This is pretty handy with ZPM. It has a special command "test" which runs all the tests you mentioned in the module. You can execute it as shown below:

zpm:USER>module-name test

And this command runs all the tests you mentioned in module.xml.

Let's see how it works.

*** archived ***

The question has come up several times and I saw mixed answers and no quick example

My personal preference is using CPIPE device as you get back exactly the output you will get at the command line interface of your OS .
The tricky thing is to stop reading in time.
The example just displays what you normally see in your console.
it becomes useful if you look for things that you can't get from any $system.whatever()

ObjectScript has at least three ways of handling errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE, etc.). Most of the system code uses statuses but exceptions are easier to handle for a number of reasons. Working with legacy code you spend some time translating between the different techniques. I use these snippets a lot for reference. Hopefully they're useful to others as well.

Mixing Object syntax with SQL is one of the nice features in Object Script. But in one case, it gave strange results, so I decided to isolate the case and describe it here.

Let's say you need to write a classmethod that updates a single property on disk. Usually, i would write that using SQL like this :

Technical surprises using VECTORs
>>> UPDATED

Building my tech. example provided me with a bunch of findings htt I want to share.
The first vectors I touched appeared with text analysis and more than 200 dimensions.
I have to confess that I feel well with Einstein's 4 dimensional world.
7 to 15 dimensions populating the String Theory are somewhat across the border.
But 200 and more is definitely far beyond my mathematical horizon.

$LIST string format and %DynamicArray and %DynamicObject classes

IRIS, and previously Cache, contain several different ways to create a sequence containing a mixture of data values. A data sequence that has been available for many years is the $LIST string. Another more recent data sequence is the %DynamicArray class, which along with the %DynamicObject class, is part of the IRIS support for JSON string representation. These two sequences involve very different tradeoffs.

$LIST String Format

Cache tricks

Several years ago, long before Developer Community Portal was launched, I published a series of Caché tricks at one of Czech web sites. In this article, I’m posting translated version of one of them.

Capturing output of someone else’s methods or routines

Suppose you, or someone else created a useful method or routine, that was producing some computation that you’d like to benefit from, but the routine was writing output to process principal device.

You would like to use the data, but you need it not written to a device, but assigned to a variable. And, for any reason, you can’t modify the code. What can you do?

Now the Classes/Rutines/DeepSee files will be automatically exported to the working directory after saving or compiling and files will be automatically deleted .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/B1pmqAQqd4M
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Installation

To install isc-dev , you just need to download and import the file isc-dev.xml from last release.
Some ways to import isc-dev .xml file:

• Go to Management Portal -> System Explorer -> Classes -> Import and select the XML file.
• Drag the file over Studio.
• Terminal command:

NS>do $system.OBJ.Load("yourpath/isc-dev.xml","ck")

• Get it from Package Manager Client:

NS>zpm
zpm: NS>install isc-dev

How to enable this feature:

• After importing the class in the target namespace, run the following method to set up the working directory:

NS>do ##class(dev.code).workdir("/path/to/your/working/directory/src/")

• Go to Management Portal -> System Administration -> Configuration -> Additional Settings -> Source Control.
• Select the target namespace and set the dev.FileManExtension class as the main one and save it.
• Try to create a new class in the studio and save/compile it
• Enjoy!

This story has followed me for more than 20 years.

In the early days of ObjectScript, the volume of $Functions was limited.
You had to write it as part of your program.
But the functionality was often implemented. It just had no name.
To use it, you had "system" calls using $ZU() functions. See Reference

Earlier this year I announced availability of a VS Code extension for coding in ObjectScript, Embedded Python or SQL using the notebook paradigm popularized by Jupyter. Today I published a maintenance release to correct a "getting started" problem.

Here's a video of the installation steps from the extension's README:

In recent discussion on CachéQuality I was (friendly) blamed for old syntax promotion and deliberate obfuscation of the code. Therefore I decided to clarify my point and shed some light on one of possible source of side effects that may unexpectedly occur with RETURN command with an argument.