Article
· Sep 11, 2024 9m read
Dates with InterSystems

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:

  1. Converting between internal and ODBC formats.
  2. Converting between local time, UTC, and Posix time.
  3. Converting to and from various date display formats.

14 4
5 776

Hey everyone,

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.

Some areas I’m especially interested in:

6 3
4 212
Article
· Apr 22, 2025 7m read
Set, Get, and Don't Fret with JSON

The Good Old Days

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:

10 3
3 381

As we all know, InterSystems is a great company.

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.

20 1
9 370

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).

0 7
0 148

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.

There are three ways to open this new terminal:

21 7
11 1.9K

Hello Community:

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.

Here are some concrete tips:

3 0
0 100

Hello Community:

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 filming yourself in general.

5 0
0 116

Hi Community,

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.

6 2
1 139

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 :)

23 29
9 12K

The latest "Bringing Ideas to Reality" InterSystems competition saw me trawling through the ideas portal for UI problems to have a go at.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zw51X1JQhQ0
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

3 0
0 255

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!

9 2
1 563

InterSystems FAQ rubric

By default, the order of columns in a table is determined automatically by the system. To change the order, explicitly set the order for each property using the property keyword SqlColumnNumber when defining the class.

Example:

Property Name As %String [SqlColumnNumber = 2];

Please see the documentation below.

8 0
0 223

I am just writing something to share what I encountered last night, which is the IRIS 2024.3 does not comes with Python by default any more!!!

Which means that I need to install it by myself!!😅 The pros is, I can select my python version😁🤭💃 The trouble is.... at the first place.... I don't know what I should do😥. By going through the community (I am much more prefer than the official document, sorry InterSystems document team😓 ), I found the following piece

7 0
0 338