#ObjectScript

Hi Community!

Coding guidelines discussion. Consider you have For with one command in the cycle. Here are the options:

One

For i=1:1:1000 set ^Test(i)=""

Two

For i=1:1:1000 {
 set ^Test(i)=""
}

Same for the "If":

if a set b=a

or

if a {
 set b=a
}

Your choice? Or maybe even other options? 

Hi, Community!

Have a question for general discussion. 

In ObjectScript we have cls for classes and mac code, which both compile into int code. 

Is there any reason when you use mac instead of cls  for non-persistent classes?

For me the benefits for cls are:

1. Inheritance and other OOP features

2. Auto-documented code 

For mac one visible benefit is easier call in terminal:

do method^Utils(p1,p2)

vs

do ##class(Package.Utils).method(p1,p2)

What is your choice and why?

Hi developers!

How do you debug implementation code in .impl classes of REST.API in InterSystems IRIS?

Especially if you don't have access to globals, so no things like: 

Set ^AAA="here we are"

not possible in this case.

Suppose I have the following signature of the REST.API method called as POST and containing JSON. :

Hi Community!

Sometimes I meet a method which accepts 10+ parameters.

And often I need only the 8th parameter  to  pass. And I call the method something like:

do ##class(Some.Feature).Method(,,,,,,,"flag")

And I don't like this method when I call it like this cause, you know, often I just miss the number of commas and raise some other flag I wanted.

How do you avoid this situations? 

If you meet such a code, how do you call it and sure that you didn't miss the number of ","?

What is a good number of parameters in a method and f you need to pass more parameters in a method what do you do?

Hi developers!

I'm testing vibecoding with ObjectScript and my silicon friend created a code-block that got me thinking "what's wrong"?

Here is the piece of code:

for i=0:1:(json.%Size()-1) {

set p = json.%Get(i)

if (p="value1")!(p="value2") {

quit 1
}

AI wanted to quit from a method with a return value. Good intention, but bad use of the command.

And ObjectScript compiler compiles this code with no error(?) (syntax linter in VSCode says it's a syntax, kudos @Brett Saviano ).

But in action, it produces <COMMAND>, of course.

Is anyone in the fine community of developers who work with ISC technologies looking at Microsoft's Visual Studio Code offering?

One of Bill McCormick's recent posts about Atelier referred to Visual Studio being considered the best IDE. Granted, Code is far less of a tool than VS, and probably always will be. But it claims to be open source and cross-platform, i.e. Linux and OS X as well as Windows.

I'm not 100% sure my post belongs in the Atelier group, but didn't see any other group that would be a better home.  Might we benefit from a "Tools" group?

Happy new year! I’m Raj Singh, InterSystems’ product manager for Developer Experience and  I’d love your feedback on how you use IDEs today and your thoughts for the future.

We understand you depend on a solid, intuitive and flexible IDE from InterSystems - whether you are an ObjectScript expert or new to it; whether ObjectScript is at the core of your applications, or you develop more in Java, Python, C# or Node.js.

Hi Devs!

A few months ago I raised a discussion on the naming convention for ZPM modules.

And you free to put your name or your organization name for the packages you want to have your personal or company's brand.

But if you contribute to community, we suggested to have "community." package for all such libraries.

But the name is too long.

What if we use "isc." instead?  Which can be read as "isc ->InterSystemsCommunity". Short and unique.

What do you think?

Hi developers!

Want to discuss with you the case of %Status.

If you familiar with ObjectScript you know what is it. I'd love to hear the history of the case why it had appeared in ObjectScript but it turned out that almost every system/library classmethods return %Status and there is a whole set of tools to deal with it.

What is does it gives you the responsibility to check the value or %Status of every system method you call.

E.g. if you save the data of the persistent class,  you should never call like this:

do obj.%Save()

you need to call:

set sc=obj.%Save()

if $$$ISERR(sc) do // something or quit.

Hi fellow developers!

Curious if you guys use CreatedAt and LastUpdated properties in your classes?

Created to stamp when the record was created and LastUpdated when it was last updated. Where it can be useful - almost everywhere )) I find it convenient in records sorting (e.g. by creation or last update), in sync (with other systems), and so on, for better analytics.

Do you use it all the time for all the classes?

If don't, why not? What do you use instead?

What property type do you use - %TimeStamp? %DateTime?

What is the best practice to have CreatedAt filled automatically during creation and LastUpdated on every successful save (guess it could be in %OnSave)?

Please share your experience /thoughts?

Let's imagine you have to implement a method with a definition

/// Set value to %session.Data
ClassMethod setValue(params...) As %Status
{
}

How it should work

do ..setValue("key1", "val")

is equal to

set %session.Data("key1") = "val"

and 

do ..setValue("key1", "key2", "key3", "key4", "val")

is equal to 

set %session.Data("key1", "key2", "key3", "key4") = "val"

so, quite simple, any amount of arguments, while the latest one is a value, and any previous is an index, should accept at least 2 arguments.

How would you implement this method?

Hi Developers!

Often we need to use relatively small arrays with constants, static arrays in algorithms, etc where we need to do something with each element of an array. There are several ways to deal with it in ObjectSctipt. 

Previously I used to use globals, locals, PPG for this but not so long time ago figured out that %List is a way too handy.

Indeed, suppose we have an array of months and need to set up and use it in our code.

Hello, InterSystems community!

Lately, you have probably heard of the new InterSystems Package Manager  - ZPM. If you're familiar with it or with such package managers as NPM, Dep, pip/PyPI, etc. or just know what is it all about -- this question is for you! The question I want to arise is actually a system design question, or, in other words, "how should ZPM implement it".

In short, ZPM (the new package manager) allows you to install packages/software to your InterSystems product in a very convenient, manageable way.

Hi Developers!

There is a free ObjectScriptQuality tool for ObjectScript developers who upload solutions on GitHub. This tool helps developers validate ObjectScript code using a variety of rules, based on common code errors.

There are currently 16 rules in this tool, but there are definitely many more rules to consider when testing ObjectScript code.

Could you suggest any other rules to add to this tool?

Note: You can submit it as an idea on the InterSystems Ideas for the 2nd Idea-A-Thon contest.

Hi developers. I often miss the ZPM program on a clean system. Nothing complicated? Take and install. And in one line? Especially in a docker container. There is a solution. I'm very happy with it;) Maybe the line can be shortened?

set $namespace="%SYS", name="DefaultSSL" do:'##class(Security.SSLConfigs).Exists(name) ##class(Security.SSLConfigs).Create(name) set url="https://pm.community.intersystems.com/packages/zpm/latest/installer" Do ##class(%Net.URLParser).Parse(url,.comp) set ht = ##class(%Net.HttpRequest).%New(), ht.Server = comp("host"), ht.Port = 443, ht.Https=1, ht.

In various tests I used both and found no real reason to prefer the one or the other.
Eventually I missed some limits. At least I didn't hit any.
What is the general opinion?
Where to use the one or the other?

The goal is to construct a comma separated string, using a loop but the same way $listtostring(var,",") would do (i.e. "a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h" without starting or ending comma).

What is the best way to do it, concerning the readability of the code and its performances?

To do so, there are more than 5 methods, but in this example we will test 4 :

1) using a "if" in the loop

set str=""
for ... {
    if str'="" { set str = str_"," }
    set str=str_myval
}

2) using a set

set (str,sep)=""
for

Work Queue Manager (WQM) is a feature of InterSystems IRIS that enables you to improve performance by distributing work to multiple concurrent processes programmatically. The idea is that you split the work into chunks, and WQM distributes the chunks across worker processes and can provide the info that the work is done.

However, recently, I got an interesting question: there's a large logical transaction composed of ~1,000,000 individual objects and SQL inserts and updates. Some updates are CPU-intensive, so the original idea was to use WQM to split an update into chunks to speed things up. 

But, here's a catch: if one of the individual 1,000,000 changes fails (there's a variety of application-level checks so that it can fail, and that's not even that abnormal a behavior), the entire transaction must be rolled back. That creates a problem: each chunk must report success before committing their individual transactions, and someone must get all these reports and decide if we are committing or not.

Unfortunately, it looks like WQM does not have a bidirectional communication between workers and manager, so I suggested an approach using events:

1. Start jobs.
2. Wait for all jobs to report success using $System.Event.WaitMsg().
3. Send Commit or Rollback using the $System.Event.Signal().

Hello community!

At the global summit in Phoenix, we (Lite Solutions) will be presenting a tool performing static code analysis on ObjectScript source files. You can see it in action at this URL:

https://demo.cachequality.com

Technically, the tool is a language plugin over SonarQube (http://sonarqube.org) and consists of three main parts:

• parsing the language,
• collecting metrics,
• collecting issues.

The third point is where we kindly request for feedback.

Explanation: issues are the result of rules being triggered by inspecting the source files.

Hi Developers!

Recently we discussed the naming convention on packages we deploy and even made some choices.

Here I want to have a conversation on the naming convention for unit tests.

Of course, we wish every good library has unit tests. Here is the documentation and some good articles(one, two, three) regarding it on the Developer Community.

Let's decide on the naming of UnitTests packages?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will all start with the UnitTest package name.

E.g. if your library's class name is:

johndoe.lib.class

The related unit test class will be:

UnitTest.johndoe.lib.class

What about folders?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will live separately from source classes, e.g. in /tests directory.

Here is the example of a repository with unit tests that are named and placed according to the proposal.

What do you think?

Hi, Community!

Open Exchange (OEX) is getting more and more popular and more and more developers consider publishing their apps in the public package manager registry.

This is really great!

So the topic of thoughtful naming convention is getting more important and even critical.  Let's discuss?

I'm scraping my way through some code that's been around for a while, and came across the use of $ZTRAP and (dear GOD) GOTO for trapping and handling errors.

In an effort to "modernize" it and make it, I don't know, less M-ish (sorry old-timers!), I'm replacing it with Try/Catch blocks.

Some questions:

1. Is this a dumb idea?
2. Anything I should look out for?
3. Did I hurt anyone's feelings?

And if the answer to number 3 is Yes, my deepest apologies ... I love you guys! 🤩

A question for anyone using InterSystems technology:

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced either trying to hire developers that know ObjectScript, or trying to train developers on ObjectScript?

• Are developers generally willing or resistant to the idea of learning ObjectScript?   Why?
• For developers trying to learn ObjectScript - what was that process like?   What were the main challenges there?
  • In-person learning?  
  • Online class? 
  • Documentation?  
  • What were your impressions?

• How did it compare to other languages?
• What would have made it easier to learn?

I'm looking into finding ways to  fetch data from cache efficiently and work with it with python - specially pandas.

i tried the following but i'm wondering if this is the most efficient way?

to run the stored procedure as %ResultSet inside cache in a classmethod and serialize the data to JSON

and then call that class method from python

 Class User.RegObj Extends %RegisteredObject
{ ClassMethod runAlpha() As %Library.DynamicAbstractObject
{
set QHi=##class(%DynamicAbstractObject).%FromJSON("{}") set rs=##class(%ResultSet).%New("User.Person:alpha")
set pr=rs.Execute("","") set idx=0 
while rs.

Hi,

InterSystems IRIS has long supported the obvious translation functions required to for converting to upper or lowercase to enforce case-insensitive string comparison (e.g. in ObjectScript with $zconvert) and sorting (e.g. with SQL collation functions, not to be confused with NLS collation). Customers in international contexts have at times used custom workarounds to also treat accent insensitivity or even more advanced normalization duct tape. We’re looking to address such use cases at the system and SQL level to increase convenience for this international audience, which is well represented on the Developer Community.

Hi Developers!

How do you handle errors with &sql a.k.a. embedded SQL?
I think I found a universal error-handling template which works in any situation:

&sql(SELECT * FROM Sample.Person)

if SQLCODE < 0 throw ##class(%Exception.SQL).CreateFromSQLCODE(SQLCODE,"Context description")

What is your choice?

Hi all,

The last time I used CSP was back in 2008, so I am very rusty on it.
This question might have been asked many times, and the answer probably is that it is a matter of preference.

Are there scenarios to which CSP pages is easier/better to use than classes extending from %CSP.Page?
I want to build a little thing and don't want to start at the wrong end.
Doing an API-based, heavy client-side framework is not a requirement, and I would prefer not to do it that way.

Some of the criteria

• Users need to do a login.

Hi folks!

We have a bunch of templates on OEX that provide a handy foundation for building a particular application with IRIS.  And the basic principle of each and every template is that we take vanilla IRIS images, load code, and files into the image using Dockerfile, and create a new docker image as a solution. And then we develop running this image and rebuilding it when returning to development.

Some developers ask me why we need to build the docker image to work with the code. Indeed, if at the end of the day I need to develop a ZPM package and not a docker image why don't run the vanilla image and load the code and everything in it? 

The problem I have with the building image approach is that often I can wait a lot to build an image and it fails on some Objectscript problem in the source that I cannot fix as the image is not building. and 

Any thoughts? How do you develop with docker?

Hello,

I would like you to propose this challenge.

It has been created by the CodeWars community here: https://www.codewars.com/kata/6523a71df7666800170a1954/python

I will copy and paste the description:

🔡🟢 DESCRIPTION:

A number is Esthetic if, in any base from base2 up to base10, the absolute difference between every pair of its adjacent digits is constantly equal to 1.