Hi all!

In this article I would like to review those VS Code extensions which I use myself to work with InterSystems and which make my work much more convenient. I am sure this article will be useful for those who are just starting their journey to learn InterSystems technologies. However, I also hope that this article could be useful for experienced developers with many years of experience and open up new possibilities for them when using VS Code for development.

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I’m excited to announce that InterSystems will be joining the open source community for InterSystems ObjectScript extension to Visual Studio Code. Early this year I posted that we were on a journey to redefine the future of our IDE strategy, and what came out of that is Visual Studio Code is the IDE that can support that future.

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Hi colleagues!

Every day Johns Hopkins University publishes new data on coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic status.

I built a simple InterSystems IRIS Analytics dashboard using InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in docker deployed on GCP Kubernetes which shows key measures of the disease outbreak.

This dashboard is an example of how information from CSV could be analyzed with IRIS Analytics and deployed to GCP Kubernetes in a form of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

Added the interactive map of the USA:

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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.

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Article
· Jun 10, 2019 1m read
more usefull Object Dump

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,

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Article
· Jul 4, 2020 4m read
Editor Archaeology

During the development of the Terminal Multi-Line Command Editor I discovered in my IRIS installation
a piece of software that I just can classify as a historic artifact. And it is still fully operational !!!

As it dates back to times before InterSystems was founded in 1978 you may understand my surprise.
I personally stepped into that environment in 1978 and used it then for daily work.

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InterSystems Official
· Oct 20, 2020
ObjectScript extension for VS Code reaches 1.0

Hello Developer Community!

Once again I'm here to talk about the ObjectScript extension for Visual Studio Code, and this time we are excited to announce the release of version 1.0!

The community has come together in an unprecedented way to deliver this product with InterSystems, and its only fitting that a tool so critical to developer productivity would be built with community testing, feedback and source code from the very beginning.

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*** 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()

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Article
· Jul 8, 2020 7m read
Tips for debugging with %Status

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

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Article
· Mar 17, 2021 3m read
Making the most of $Query

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:

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Article
· Feb 16, 2018 2m read
Adopted Bitmap

The base class Bmap.Person defines persons within an organization distributed
by various countries. All records are indexed by (Country, PersonalId).
this structure doesn't allow use of bitmaps.

So a wrapper class Bmap.PersonQ around the data eliminates the top level of
the index (Country) and isolates the PersonalId (%Integer, MINVAL=1).
We are ready to use a Bitmap index.

A few performance figures on 300010 generated records.
You see that Relative Cost are sometimes quite misleading.

base

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As you know in Caché / IRIS you have the possibility to define a property as Multidimensional as documented here:
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim
and the explanation of how to use it
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim_values

Though the access is quite comfortable (in traditional COS sense) there are 2 main restrictions that hurt:

#1) It is not saved to disk unless your application includes code to save it specifically.
#2) It cannot be stored in or exposed through SQL tables
there are some more
I'll show how to overcome these limits

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Article
· Dec 9, 2019 1m read
SUDOKU demo

A demo in traditional style COS

This was written based on a previous trial in .XLS
It is far from being perfect. Rather a challenge for
improvement in all directions (code, interface, ...)
So anyone feel invited to make it better.

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Hi Developers!

Often when we develop some library, tool, package, whatever on InterSystems ObjectScript we have a question, how we deploy this package on the target machine?

Also, we often expect that some other libraries already installed, so our package depends on them, and often on some particular version of it.

When you code on javascript, python, etc the role of packages deployment with dependency management takes package manager.

So, I'm pleased to announce that InterSystems ObjectScript Package Manager available!

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Article
· Jul 27, 2020 2m read
ZPMshow, a helper for tired fingers

The offer of ZPM is growing daily and the short names and
acronyms of the offer are sometimes hard to understand and
also hard to type with my lazy fingers.

So I decided to have

  • a listing with the descriptions from the repository,
  • split in short junks to avoid backscroll,
  • controlled forward / backward scrolling,
  • the option to select my packages by number,
  • to install or uninstall with limited typing.

It runs with do ^zpmshow

A snapshot from the screen:

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Article
· Mar 2 4m read
Tutorial - Streams in Pieces

This tutorial is a follow on to Working with %Query
It was displaying the content of the input stream chopped in fixed-size chunks.
But often those streams are structured and have well-defined separators (e.g HL7)
So as a side subject of this tutorial, this chapter shows how to break a stream into PIECES.

It is exactly the same idea as the $PIECE() function for strings with some add-ons.

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Article
· Apr 26, 2020 5m read
Materialized Views

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.

{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them devil }

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