#Other

Welcome to the monthly recap of updates and releases to VS Code and InterSystems-related extensions relevant to IRIS developers. 

Don’t forget, if you’re migrating from InterSystems Studio to VS Code, or want to deepen your knowledge, check out the VS Code training courses from George James Software: georgejames.com/vscode-training. 

This recap covers the four VS Code releases in May: v1.119, v1.120, v1.121, and v1.122.

Editor and navigation

• Quieter inline suggestions (v1.

In the previous IoP article, I showed how IoP can expose Python messages to DTL by generating JSON schemas. That is useful when the message is primarily a Python object and we want the IRIS tooling to understand its structure.

This time, the direction is a little different.

Starting with IoP 3.7.1, a PersistentMessage can now be a native IRIS message body class. The Python class is still the source code you write, but the generated IRIS class extends Ens.MessageBody

Abstract

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.

This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.

For those of you that weren't at READY last week, you may have missed the exciting announcement that the Early Access Program for AI Hub is officially open. It was announced during an amazing demo from @Benjamin De Boe and @Jeff Fried, I recommend catching up with this demo when the recording is released!  I had the opportunity to play with AI Hub in advance, and thought I might share an introduction with the community.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ The First Tool Call: The Hack That Sparked Agentic AI

This article introduces SHAP explainability methods as an approach to understand the reasons behind predictions in machine learning black-box models. It also includes a simple Jupyter notebook that you can use and modify to gain hands-on experience with these concepts:

https://www.kaggle.com/code/jorgeivnjh/explainability-in-ml-models

https://github.com/JorgeIvanJH/Explainability-in-ML-models

We will leverage these concepts for a future implementation in our Continuous Training Pipeline: https://community.intersystems.com/post/complementing-iris-mlflow-continuous-training-ct-pipeline

Hi everyone,

I’ve been diving into the new IRIS 2026.1 features this week, specifically trying out the opt-in modernized Interoperability UI and the new DTL Explainer, but I’ve recently hit a persistent technical snag where the Management Portal becomes incredibly sluggish and my Terminal sessions start to experience significant input latency.

I am currently using a community setup to handle some automated local logging and script-based data scrubbing for my production archives in the background while I work.

Is there any dedicated place on the InterSystems site to complain about "Ask DC AI" lack of rather simple knowledge? I'd say, as a bare minimum it should be trained on ALL InterSystems usually excellent documentation and know how to quote from it. A couple of recent examples, all of them "beyond my knowledge", which really should not be "beyond my knowledge". Common language rephrasing did help with a couple of requests below, but AI should be able to rephrase itself.

Hi Community!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the "Suggest topics for our next free hands-on tutorials" sweepstakes! Your ideas and suggestions are invaluable and will definitely influence our tutorials roadmap! 

Now, it's time to announce the winner – watch the video to see the sweepstake drawing:

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ MCP Explained: Bridging the Gap between AI Agents and Tools

Before finding the best solution for Supply Chain, we need to understand what Supply Chain is. Well, regardless of the language used, the term is known by the name already mentioned. For your information, the translation in Brazilian Portuguese is "Cadeia de Suprimentos" (Supply Chain), sometimes also called "Cadeia Logística" (Logistics Chain), but we will not dwell on the nomenclature, but rather on the meaning.

hi 😊,

i'm able to LOAD DATA in IRIS from a rather complex, say Oracle's, query. It works pretty well but requires a target table created aforehand:

LOAD DATA FROM JDBC CONNECTION SOME_OTHER_SERVER QUERY 'complex query here' INTO TargetTable

is there a way to base such target table on the same query ? 
CREATE FOREIGN TABLE seems to require a column definition which I would prefer to be taken from the query
CREATE TABLE AS SELECT seems to be for local queries and other methods, like Linked Table Wizard or %SYSTEM.SQL.Schema.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Vibe Coding: Letting AI Build While You Steer

Hi folks,

One of the things I've been thinking about recently: how strong AI is changing my work as an ObjectScript developer right now! Yeah, yeah, I know I'm not a very fast, it should have happened 2-3 years ago... But it's only now that I've realized that I am not writing the code all my workday like before.

I may have mentioned this before: I believe the Visual Traces, these sequence diagrams with full content of each step, are a fantastic feature of the IRIS Data platform! Detailed information about how the API works internally, as a visual trace, can be very useful for projects on the IRIS platform. Of course, this applies when we are not developing a high-load solution, in which case we simply don't have time for saving/reading messages. For all other cases, welcome to this tutorial!

Welcome to the monthly recap of updates and releases to VS Code and InterSystems-related extensions relevant to IRIS developers. 

If you're migrating from InterSystems Studio to VS Code, or want to deepen your knowledge check out the VS Code training courses from George James Software: georgejames.com/vscode-training.

VS Code version 1.110
Kitty graphics protocol in the Terminal - The integrated terminal now supports the Kitty graphics protocol, allowing for high-fidelity image rendering directly in the terminal pane.

Hello, how are you?

Using Healthshare for Interoperability, we often see a wide variety of encoding issues. Some happen when transforming XML to HL7. Some happen the other ay around transforming HL7 to XML.

Is there a valid way to understand which encoding needs to be used?

I ask, because we use SOAP or REST or TCP HL7 services.

And we deliver messages with TCP HL7, SOAP, HTTP Operations.

And we often face this issue where special characters like ñ or á, are not encoded correctly.

Thanks for your replies.

InterSystems’ team is heading to the GrandHack 2026 hackathon, taking place on March 13-15, 2026!

MIT Hacking Medicine's GrandHack 2026 is the flagship annual event that brings together innovators to address pressing healthcare challenges. This year's hackathon features the tracks Trauma and Rehabilitation, Virtual Diagnostic Interfaces, and Portable Health, all focused on developing solutions that improve patient care and outcomes.