Earlier this year, the AppS.REST package was released. AppS.REST is a framework for easily exposing existing persistent classes in IRIS as REST resources. AppS.REST-enabled classes support CRUD operations with little effort from the developer, bridging the gap between persistent data in IRIS and data consumers, such as an Angular front end application.

But IRIS classes are much more than just a definition for loading and saving individual records! This article aims to highlight a few ways to leverage the power of IRIS in your REST applications. Using the Phone.Contact sample app, we'll look at out-of-the-box query support, use of class queries and finally ObjectScript methods.

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Article
· Sep 21, 2016 7m read
REST in Pieces

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

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Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.

When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.

Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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Hi guys.

Recently, I get interest in FHIR in order to run for the IRIS for Health FHIR
contest
. As a beginner on this topic, I've heard somewhat about it, but I didn't know how complex and powerful was FHIR. As pointed out by @Henrique Dias here, you can model several aspects of the patient history and other related entities.

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Article
· Jul 31, 2019 2m read
Anti CSRF Methods

IRIS provides us with anti login CSRF attack mitigation, however this is not the same as a CSRF attack, as login attacks only occur on the login form. There are currently no built-in tools to mitigate CSRF attacks on api calls and other forms, so this is a step in mitigating these attacks.

See the following link from OWASP for the definition of a CSRF attack:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(CSRF)

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Article
· Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

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Article
· Sep 6, 2017 4m read
Polling an External REST API with Ensemble

Preface

Before we begin, I'd like to mention that I am by no means an Ensemble expert, so take this with a grain of salt and please feel free to offer any suggestions for improvement. That being said, I have enjoyed working with Ensemble and wanted to share the approach I took to poll an external REST API for patient data in the hopes that it might help others with a similar goal.

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For the upcoming Python contest, I would like to make a small demo, on how to create a simple REST application using Python, which will use IRIS as a database. Using this tools

  • FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
  • SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL
  • Alembic is a lightweight database migration tool for usage with the SQLAlchemy Database Toolkit for Python.
  • Uvicorn is an ASGI web server implementation for Python.

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or "Didn't you say you would cover Persistent Objects in Part 5, Chris?"

Yes, that was the plan. This is a pretty important topic, so it get's its own Article

Up until now, we've display widget JSON that has been created by a basic loop. Clearly this isn't of much value. Now we have our stack connected together, and we can see that the data is flowing to the Welcome page, it's time to complete the stack and start feeding our service from "real" data.

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Article
· Feb 14, 2023 9m read
Generate client SOAP and REST

Hi Community,

I would like to take advantage of our topic on capture for Health Data Warehouses (on DC-FR) to show you how to quickly create HTTP SOAP and REST clients. IRIS, as well as applications available on Open Exchange offers solutions to generate them from a WSDL or a swagger specification.

SOAP client

Nothing could be easier than creating a SOAP client. All you need is the WSDL. A wizard is available from the IRIS Studio. It allows you to generate not only your classes for a web service client but also the “Business Services” and “Business Operations” if you want to consume them with the interoperability framework.

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Introduction

We are in the age of the multiplatform economy and APIs are the "glue" in this digital scenario. Since they are so important, they are seen by developers as a service or product to be consumed. Therefore, usage experience is a crucial factor for its success.

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Article
· Apr 18, 2017 1m read
Having your Node.js Cake and Eating It Too

I've mentioned the QEWD project in this group before: it's a Node.js-based platform for web, Native and REST applications which tightly integrates with Cache. It uses a somewhat different philosophy to the use of Node.js than the norm, and I've now published an article that explains this approach and the unique benefits that arise as a result.

It turns out that, integrated via QEWD, Cache is an ideal bed-fellow for Node.js. QEWD makes the integration of Cache and Node.js exceptionally fast, simple and intuitive to use, but also extremely powerful.

Read the article here:

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FHIR has revolutionized the healthcare industry by providing a standardized data model for building healthcare applications and promoting data exchange between different healthcare systems. As the FHIR standard is based on modern API-driven approaches, making it more accessible to mobile and web developers. However, interacting with FHIR APIs can still be challenging especially when it comes to querying data using natural language.

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What if you could serialize/deserialize objects in whatever format: JSON, XML, CSV,...; attending different criteria: export/import some properties and not others, transform values in this or that way before exporting/importing,...; and all of this without having to change the class definition? Wouldn't that be great??

Well, perhaps it's a goal too ambitious to reach 100% but, exploring this idea, I've developed a bunch of classes that I thought it was good to share. If you want to test, change, modify or improve the code, or just take a look at it, you can do it here. There you'll find a more detailed explanation (see Readme.md)

Be aware, this is a proof of concept for myself done in spare times, sure it's not robust enough or it can be done much better... but, I was just playing...ok, I could just wait to the new JSON Adaptor (coming soon!) that sure is going to resolve much more scenarios in a cleaner way, but... meanwhile... :-) ...

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In this article, I would show how you can upload and download files from InterSystems products via http.

The questions about working with files over http arise fairly often on community and I'm usually linking to my FileServer project which demonstrates file upload/download but I'd like to talk a bit more on how we can serve and receive files from InterSystems products.

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Let's imagine if you would like to write some real web application, for instance, some simple clone of medium.com. Such sort of application can be written using any different language on the backend side, or with any framework on the frontend side. So many ways to do the same application, and you can look at this project. Which offers a bunch of frontends and backends realizations for exactly the same application. And you can easily mix them, any chosen frontend should work with any backend.

Let me introduce the same application realization for InterSystems IRIS on a backend side.

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or "Things are going to break"

We left our application over the weekend, secure in the knowledge that it was returning data from our primary persistent class, User.Widget. However, Widgets Direct are the premier supplier of both Widgets AND Widget Accessories, so we should really start working on adding these Accessories to our application.

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There's a new and exciting enhancement to QEWD that has just been released - it's an additional layer of abstraction known as QEWD-Up. QEWD-Up hides away all the mechanics of QEWD itself, allowing you to focus on just your REST APIs and the code that implements them.

Additionally, and importantly, QEWD-Up simplifies the maintenance of your REST APIs, allowing you (and others) to quickly and easily understand their life-cycle and implementation.

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In this article, we will explore the development of an IRIS client for consuming RESTful API services that have been developed to the OData API standard.

We will be exploring a number of built-in IRIS libraries for making HTTP requests, reading and writing to JSON payloads, and seeing how we can use them in combination to build a generic client adaptor for OData. We will also explore the new JSON adapter for deserializing JSON into persistent objects.

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Article
· Sep 23, 2016 6m read
Creating a RESTful Service using Ensemble

This is a detailed guide to develop RESTful services using InterSystems Ensemble. The goal of this guide is to make you understanding the basic concept and building blocks of a RESTful service. The service is going to provide a very basic functionality (a “Hello world!”).

You will learn how to create required components as Ensemble classes, configure the run-time as an Ensemble Production and create a service configuration as a web application.

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InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.

In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.

In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.

There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:

  • Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
  • Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
  • Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
  • High availability configuration
  • etc.
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Hi Developers!

Suppose you have a persistent class with data and you want to have a simple Angular UI for it to view the data and make CRUD operations.

Recently @Alberto Fuentes described how to build Angular UI for your InterSystems IRIS application using RESTForms2.

In this article, I want to tell you how you can get a simple Angular UI to CRUD and view your InterSystems IRIS class data automatically in less than 5 minutes.

Let's go!

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