I'm pleased to announce version 2.6.0 of the VS Code ObjectScript extension, containing a number of enhancements that make a developer's life easier. Some highlights are described below. As always, find the full list of modifications in the CHANGELOG, including many bug and vulnerability fixes.

When there's a performance issue, whether for all users on the system or a single process, the shortest path to understanding the root cause is usually to understand what the processes in question are spending their time doing. Are they mostly using CPU to dutifully march through their algorithm (for better or worse); or are they mostly reading database blocks from disk; or mostly waiting for something else, like LOCKs, ECP or database block collisions?

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).

Hi - Recently I have been investigating an annoying situation whilst editing ObjectScript classes or routines in VSCode.

What was happening to me was, as I was typing in lines of code into my class (for example, adding a new Method, or changing the Class signature, or a block of code), this would quickly get syntax checked, re-formatted, and compiled - inevitably, (since I would be mid-way through my typing), this would generate compilation errors.

Caché offers a number of methods for going through a collection and doing something with its elements. The easiest method uses a while-loop and lets you fulfill the task in an imperative manner. The developer needs to take care of the iterator, jumping to the next element and checking if the loop is within the collection.

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

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:

Over the years, I have found myself needing to create multiple HL7 messages based on a single inbound message. Usually these take the form of an order or result from a lab. Each time I have approached it, I have tried to start from scratch under the belief that the previous attempt could have been done better.

$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

Introduction

The common requirement in many applications is logging of data changes in a database - which data has changed, who changed them and when (audit logging). There are many articles about this question and there are different approaches on how to do that in Caché.

Hey Developers,

We know you've been waiting for this for a whole year. The time has finally come!

Join the Advent of Code 2022 with InterSystems and participate in our ObjectScript contest to win $$$$ prizes!

Hey Developers,

Are you ready to participate in the annual December competition?

Join the Advent of Code 2020 with InterSystems and participate in our ObjectScript contest to win some $$$ prizes!

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.