#Tips & Tricks

Greetings all,

Need to connect your VSCode to an InterSystems Server?

Heard of this option?

Testing ECP-based applications often take quite some effort for setup and preparation.
I have created a Docker-based workbench that allows you to have it quick at hands.
And if you crash it? You just give your containers a fresh start.
The whole setup runs code-based during the start-up of your instance.
In that sense, it is also a portable coding example using ZPM and the objectscript-docker-template

 see Video

Has anyone tried to install cache on an external flash drive?

If you create your own Language Extensions to Object you mostly have to find the
proper %ZLANGC00 or %ZLANGV00 or %ZLANGF00 and add the extensions manually.
A few utilities do it already automatically (ZPM, ZME, ..)
This utility allows you to add your extensions programmatically. (eg. at first run, or during installation)
I found this quite useful for my Docker-based demos as it all happens at the start time.

It is related to these articles

• Parameter passing to Language Extensions
• Language Extensions  

This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3 and IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Standard error logs in IRIS / Caché / Ensemble are written global ^ERRORS.
As this piece dates back some decades back to previous millennium its structure
is far from the typical SQL storage structures.

How would you like to be able to access the Web Terminal directly from your VSCode?

Hello all,

Is there any command or way to update the versionid on windows similar to  the "iris update <instance> versionid=<version>" on linux?

I'm participating in the Developing with InterSystems Objects and SQL with Joel Solon. The course is very nice and I will share with you some tips I got during the training. Tips presented in the day 2:

Hi folks!

Just a very short note on if you want to add a cute Open Exchange shield like this:

 in your GitHub repo you can do it by entering one line like this:

[![Gitter](https://img.shields.io/badge/Available%20on-Intersystems%20Open%20Exchange-00b2a9.svg)](https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/csvgen)

In the URL place the path to your OEX page.

Thanks to the participants of contest for such a neat shield )

What other helpful Github shields do you know? Please share in the comments?

One of the leading benefits of ObjectScript is the speed and efficiency it allows for an experienced developer. Let's look at an example of how you can benefit from ObjectScript today.

Suppose you have a class that stores the names of your users. We'll call the class Data.User, and give it a string property Name. Next, we will need a method to create a new user or update an existing one. A naive, simplistic approach might look like this example:

Let's imagine you have to implement a method with a definition

/// Set value to %session.Data
ClassMethod setValue(params...) As %Status
{
}

How it should work

do ..setValue("key1", "val")

is equal to

set %session.Data("key1") = "val"

and 

do ..setValue("key1", "key2", "key3", "key4", "val")

is equal to 

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

You might have encountered this and not known how to prevent it, or perhaps not even noticed it...

In this post I show strategies for backing up Caché using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot based solutions. The majority of solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.