Hey everyone,

I'm diving deeper into Caché ObjectScript and would love to open a discussion around the most useful tips, tricks, and best practices you’ve learned or discovered while working with it.

Whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started, ObjectScript has its own set of quirks and powerful features—some well-documented, others hidden gems. I’m looking to compile a helpful set of ideas from the community.

Some areas I’m especially interested in:

Dynamic Entities (objects and arrays) in IRIS are incredibly useful in situations where you are having to transform JSON data into an Object Model for storage to the database, such as in REST API endpoints hosted within IRIS. This is because these dynamic objects and arrays can easily serve as a point of conversion from one data structure to the other.

Dynamic Objects

Dynamic Objects are very similar to the standard ObjectScript object model you get when you create a new instance of a class object, but with some key differences:

I have a table in the development and want to erase data from certain columns. There is info in the docs but not for human

This piece of code does not work

ALTER TABLE table DROP COLUMN column %DELDATA

Is there a way to use a property of the type %Persistent class in a %ZEN.Component.page class?
Example:

As part of a migration project from a bunch of java classes to IRIS, we need to maintain a few jar files due to some external dependencies.

The problem I am seeing is that I cannot pass a byte array ( byte[] ) from ObjectScript to the Java Class. I have tried a number of different ways

I have reproduced in a java class and Objectscript class:
Java Class:

Introduction

HL7 messages often contain multiple repeating segments such as NTE, AL1, OBX, ZTX, DG1, and others. These segments sometimes require individual processing and routing to different downstream systems. This technical paper introduces a configurable template designed to automate the splitting of these repeating HL7 segments, improving message handling and integration efficiency.

I'm sure I've seen this issue reported before, but a search hasn't turned it up.

This appears to happen randomly, but once it starts it doesn't seem to stop ... at least for a while. I attempt to compile a class and compilation fails but produces no error explaining why. Here's an example:

Word documents are widely used in the market. Users frequently create contracts, memos, resumes, reports, analyses, and other documents that may require data from or captured by InterSystems IRIS. However, IRIS does not have an API, SDK, library, or adapter for this. This limitation no longer exists.

The new Open Exchange library iris4word (https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/iris4word) delivers an ObjectScript SDK where the developer passes any %DynamicObject as a parameter, a Word file template and then receives a ready document, with the structure and formatting defined in its template.

Hello my friends,

I have a bit problem with date format, I need to display like this DD-MM-YYYY

I've put the objectscript like this : set DOB=$zd(paper.PAPERDob,15)

and the result is

Why It cannot show the full year, I mean why 99 or 95 why not 1999 or 1995 ?

Thank You

Best Regards,

Steven Henry

Hello Community,

I have a queue that I need to traverse and perform operations on. To distribute the workload across multiple processes, I used a Work Queue Manager do process and I'm not expecting any status from it So, I skipped Sync / WaitForComplete in my implementation

Modules what a topic! We don't have this notion in ObjectScript, but it's a fundamental concept in Python. Let's discover it together.

What is a Module?

I see modules as an intermediate layer between classes and packages. Let see it by example.

A bad example :

Finishing my previous example for multiple IRIS instances, I tried
to compose a local single instance version. The step from the external
Python app to a version using embedded Python seemed to be obvious.
This was a wrong assumption, as some Python libraries just refused installation
into my local Windows-based environment.

Hello again IRIS community,

We have officially released our InterSystems IRIS Developer Professional certification exam for beta testing. The beta test will be available until April 20, 2025. As a beta tester, you have the chance to earn the certification for free!

I need to add an extra blank OBX segment after a segment containing text, Total Cost:

I get the OBX segment but it is in incorrect location.

It should be after the line containing Total Cost:

It needs to contain:

OBX|1|TX|2000.02^REASON FOR REQUEST^AS4|

code: