Do not let the title of this article confuse you; we are not planning to take the InterSystems staff out to a fine Italian restaurant. Instead, this article will cover the principles of working with date and time data types in IRIS. When we use these data types, we should be aware of three different conversion issues:
Converting between internal and ODBC formats.
Converting between local time, UTC, and Posix time.
Converting to and from various date display formats.
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.
My team is exploring options for handling timezone offsets in DTL and we’re wondering if there are any built-in methods available — ideally low-code or no-code solutions. Specifically, we're looking for a way to adjust timestamps based on the date and whether Daylight Saving Time (DST) is in effect.
Reviewing the different articles that I have published, I realized that I needed to explain a very practical functionality within our EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) and it is none other than the notification of registrations and links to systems external to the EMPI.
The %Library.DynamicObject class has been in IRIS since before it became IRIS. If you have been using it since the Cache days, you may want to brush up on some of its changes.
In Cache 2018, the %Get method only had one argument. It was the key to retrieving from the JSON, meaning that if your JSON object called myObj, it would look like the following:
Their products can be just as useful as they are complex.
Yet, our pride sometimes prevents us from admitting that we might not understand some concepts or products that InterSystems offers for us.
Today we are beginning a series of articles explaining how some of the intricate InterSystems products work, obviously simply and clearly.
In this essay, I will clarify what Machine Learning is and how to take advantage of it.... because this time, you WILL KNOW for sure what I am talking about.
Is there a generic process for "walking" the structure of a virtual document - eg an HL7 message (EnsLib.HL7.Message) or an XML document (EnsLib.EDI.XML.Document).
At least we'd want to be able to visit all "nodes" (HL7 fields or sub-fields, XML nodes) in the virtual document and be able to work out/generate the Property Path (so we could call "GetValueAt").
We can just about come up with something generic for HL7, since it only nests down to 4 levels within each segment, though we're using numeric Property Path's at that point rather than symbolic ones (MSH:1.3 etc).
Have you ever been editing files in VS Code, but needed to check a global value or run a few ObjectScript commands? Now you can, with no setup required! If you have vscode-objectscript extension version 2.10.0 or later and are connected to InterSystems IRIS 2023.2 or later, you can now open a terminal connection to your server, regardless of where it's located.
In the process of trying to get more familiar with Objectscript I decided to try to build a general priority queue since I wasn't able to find an implementation anywhere. My though process for implementing this followed this general path.
High-Performance Message Searching in Health Connect
The Problem
Have you ever tried to do a search in Message Viewer on a busy interface and had the query time out? This can become quite a problem as the amount of data increases. For context, the instance of Health Connect I am working with does roughly 155 million Message Headers per day with 21 day message retention. To try and help with search performance, we extended the built-in SearchTable with commonly used fields in hopes that indexing these fields would result in faster query times. Despite this, we still couldn't get some of these queries to finish at all.
Since InterSystems has recently announced the discontinuation of support for InterSystems Studio starting from version 2023.2 in favor of exclusive development of extensions for the Visual Studio Code (VSC) IDE, believing that the latter offers a superior experience compared to Studio, many of us developers have switched or are beginning to use VSC. Many may have wondered how to open the Terminal to perform operations, as VSC does not have an Output panel like Studio did, nor an integrated feature to open the IRIS terminal, except by downloading the plugins developed by InterSystems.
Let's go with the last article on how to record yourselves for the Article Contest video bonus.
I'm not going to go into how to do very specific things in editing because it varies depending on the program you use. The keyboard shortcuts and menus are different, but the concept is the same. You are going to use a programme to organise the recorded material, remove the excess and give it structure. Many of these softwares are free (Capcut, Canva and if I'm not mistaken DaVinci had a free version). I've been editing with Adobe Premiere for almost ten years now (wow, I'm getting old), so if you have any questions about this software, feel free to write to me.
Do you want to know how to record yourself without looking like you're speaking from a cave? Are you one of those who say you ‘don't come off well on camera’?
Today I'm going to share with you some specific tips that I learned after several years of filming interviews for television and networks. I remind you that these are tips in case you are thinking of taking advantage of the Article Contest video bonus. However, they are tips that I'm sure you can use for presenting webinars, video calls and filmingyourself in general.
As you may know, this year's Spanish Technical Articles contest will be in May. I am going to make a series of articles to support you in the creation of your articles, giving tips and tricks. Perhaps they will be useful for the contest you have active in this community as well.
As you may know, one of the bonuses or extra points you can receive is to add a video tutorial to your article. You may not even know how to approach this issue, no problem! I'm here to give you some tips that you can apply not only to the creation of these videos, but to any other.
Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)
Here at InterSystems, we often deal with massive datasets of structured data. It’s not uncommon to see customers with tables spanning >100 fields and >1 billion rows, each table totaling hundred of GB of data. Now imagine joining two or three of these tables together, with a schema that wasn’t optimized for this specific use case. Just for fun, let’s say you have 10 years worth of EMR data from 20 different hospitals across your state, and you’ve been tasked with finding….
The latest "Bringing Ideas to Reality" InterSystems competition saw me trawling through the ideas portal for UI problems to have a go at.
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If you want to raise an arbitrary custom error in a TRY block, you can pass an exception with a throw as follows. In the following example, a custom error is raised if Stcount is less than 1.
As we keep updating our software, we often realize that we require more and more modern solutions. So far, only one major piece of our software relies on reading barcodes in documents and images. Since Cache did not have a means of reading barcodes in the past, we have always achieved our goals by using a Visual Basic 6 application. However, it is no longer an ideal solution because it is currently complicated to maintain it. IRIS also lacks this capability, but it has recently got an option that makes up for it: embedded Python!
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