I have been using embedded python for more than 2 years now on a daily basis.
May be it's time to share some feedback about this journey.

Why write this feedback? Because, I guess, I'm like most of the people here, an ObjectScript developer, and I think that the community would benefit from this feedback and could better understand the pros & cons of chosing embedded python for developing stuff in IRIS. And also avoid some pitfalls.

• Feedback : Using embedded python daily for 2 years
• Introduction
• Starting with Python
  • Python is not ObjectScript
    • Pep8
    • Modules
    • Dunders
  • Conclusion
• Embedded Python
  • What is Embedded Python ?
  • How to use Embedded Python ?
  • How I use Embedded Python
    • Use Python libraries and code as they were ObjectScript classes
      • With the language tag
      • Without the language tag
      • Conclusion
    • Use a python first approach
      • Example : iris-fhir-python-strategy
      • Remarks
      • Where to find the code
      • How to implement a Strategy
      • Implementation of InteractionsStrategy
      • Implementation of Interactions
      • Interactions in Python
      • Implementation of the abstract python class
      • Too long, do a summary

If you develop in IRIS you are confronted with two major phenomena:

• an incredibly fast and excellent designed data storage engine
• a scripting language to work on this storage engine, actually named ObjectScript

The invention and popularization of Large Language Models (such as OpenAI's GPT-4) has launched a wave of innovative solutions that can leverage large volumes of unstructured data that was impractical or even impossible to process manually until recently.

The topic of for/while loop performance in Caché ObjectScript came up in discussion recently, and I'd like to share some thoughts/best practices with the rest of the community. While this is a basic topic in itself, it's easy to overlook the performance implications of otherwise-reasonable approaches.

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.

Hello!

This article is a small overview of a tool that helps to understand classes and their structure inside the InterSystems products: from IRIS to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare.

In short, it visualizes a class or an entire package, shows the relations between classes and provides all the possible information to developers and team leads without making them go to Studio and examine the code there.

If you are learning InterSystems products, reviewing projects a lot or just interested in something new in InterSystems Technology solutions — you are more than welcome to read the overview of ObjectScript Class Explorer!

1.About this article

Just like Caché pattern matching, Regular Expressions can be used in Caché to identify patterns in text data – only with a much higher expressive power. This article provides a brief introduction into Regular Expressions and what you can do with it in Caché. The information provided herein is based on various sources, most notably the book “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey Friedl and of course the Caché online documentation. The article is not intended to discuss all the possibilities and details of regular expressions. Please refer to the information sources listed in chapter 5 if you would like to learn more. If you prefer to read off-line you can also download the PDF version of this article.

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?

In a previous exercise, I was able to show the power of Caché.
A medium-designed set of interdependent tables with some GB of data.
URLs cross reference over some million pages resulting in ~3 billion records

Competition was between

• Caché
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL

Criteria were Speed + Storage consumption
I composed a customized loader fed over a "raw" TCP connection
Mapping the "objects" into the final table by directly writing to Global Storage.,

What is Web Scraping:

In simple terms, Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is an automated process of collecting large data(unstructured) from websites. The user can extract all the data on particular sites or the specific data as per the requirement. The data collected can be stored in a structured format for further analysis.

During testing your code you are often confronted with the need to examine
the actual content of an object. Either using ZWRITE or $system.OBJ.Dump()
you get a picture of simple properties as "--- attribute values ---"
while "--- swizzled references ---" are more confusing than informative
and with "--- calculated references ---" you are just left in the lurch.

This small helper class allows you to dump an object to terminal or
e.g in background to some stream for later review.
By default, you see just properties with content,

There are many ways to generate excel files using Intersystems, some of them are ZEN reports, IRIS reports ( Logi reports or formally known as JReports), or we can use third party Java libraries, the possibilities are almost endless.

But, what if you want to create a simple spreadsheet with only Caché ObjectScript? (no third party applications)

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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()

I ran into an interesting ObjectScript use case today with a general solution that I wanted to share.

Use case:

I have a JSON array (specifically, in my case, an array of issues from Jira) that I want to aggregate over a few fields - say, category, priority, and issue type. I then want to flatten the aggregates into a simple list with the total for each of the groups. Of course, for the aggregation, it makes sense to use a local array in the form:

agg(category, priority, type) = total

Such that for each record in the input array I can just: