#Tips & Tricks

We have some ObjectScript code in a custom business process:

When Log Trace Events is ticked on the business process in the Production view in the management portal, the argument is obviously computed.

Our question is whether the argument is computed when Log Trace Events is not ticked? Don't want to accidentally include something in a $$$TRACE() statement that takes enough computation to make a performance difference when released to production, even though the final output is not written to the event log.

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:

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.

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.

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 :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most 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.

Another VSCode "Tips & Tricks" entry -

Do you want to see this option in VSCode?

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

InterSystems FAQ rubric

It can be obtained with a List query of the %SYS.Namespace class.

1. Create a routine like this:

getnsp
   set##class

2. Run it in your terminal

The method of executing class queries introduced in this article can be applied in a variety of cases.

You can see various class queries in the class reference. For example,
　%SYS.DatabaseQuery: GetFreeSpace()　Free space in database
　%SYS.GlobalQuery: DirectoryList　           List of global names in database
　%SYS.GlobalQuery: Size

The ability to resend messages easily has always been a strong feature of our Interoperability capabilities.

With v2024.3 coming out soon (available already now as Developer Preview) out already we've made this even easier!

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!

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.

SqlColumnNumber

If you want to change the SQL table name, specify SqlTableName. If you want to change the column name (field name), specify SqlFieldName.

Both apply only to persistent classes.

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 

https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20242/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.

I was working on a DTL but kept getting ERROR #5002... MAXSTRING errors. The problem was that most of the DTL GUI action steps only support the string data type when working with the segments. A %String has a limit of 3,641,144 characters and my OBX5.1 was 5,242,952 characters long as the example provided. Of course PACS admin stated ultra high quality up to and including 4K resolution files were needed, so we could not get the vendor to compress or reformat these files to compressed jpg or something similar.

Initially this vendor sends a 2.3 ORU^R01

Many programming languages use the try-and-catch construct to handle runtime errors gracefully. If the code within the try block encounters an error, it will throw an exception to the catch block, where the error handling occurs. Today we will dive into the ObjectScript implementation of this construct and discuss some ways to clean things up.

In the business world, every second counts, and having high-performing applications is essential for streamlining our business processes. We understand the significance of crafting efficient algorithms, measurable through the big O notation.

Nevertheless, there are numerous strategies to boost the performance of systems built on the IRIS Data Platform. These strategies are equally crucial for optimizing overall efficiency.

Let's join the journey for a sneak peek into the tips for making IRIS Data Platform work better, where every little trick will help your applications shine.

1.

There are many applications for working with HL7 V2 messages, but the tools for working with XML in IRIS Management Portal and Cache Studio are limited. While plenty of external utilities and IDEs work with XML messages and even C-CDA documents, there is a compelling case for being able to test directly against the IRIS C-CDA framework. 

Testing within the IRIS environment provides the necessary context: 

• XML parser configuration
• XML namespace context
• Facility and OID setup
• IHE header handling
• The HS.IHE.Util, HS.Util.XSLTTransformer, and %XML.XSLT.

We are doing healthcare interface development.

Developers have Ensemble installed locally on their laptops - code will be developed locally then deployed to integration, test/UAT and ultimately production servers in due course.

One of the other applications we are developing around happens to utilise an Iris desktop client to a remote Iris server. We want to have the application available on the developers laptops alongside the local Ensemble instance.

✅ It appears that if we install their desktop client then install our local Ensemble server, things work.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

On Windows, this cannot be changed, but on Unix-like platforms, it can be changed using the iris rename command.

iris rename instname(<current instance name>) newname(<new instane name>)

For more information about the iris rename command, please refer to the following document:

About the iris command
 

There's an easy new way to add certificate authority (CA) certificates to your SSL/TLS configurations on InterSystems IRIS 2019.1 (and 2018.1.2) on Windows and Mac.  You can ask IRIS to use the operating system's certificate store by entering:

%OSCertificateStore

in the field for "File containing Trusted Certificate Authority X.509 certificate(s)".   Here's an image of how to do this in the portal:

And here's a link to the documentation which describes this.  It's in the list of options under "File containing trusted Certificate Authority certificate(s)".

That's all you need to do!

Hi,

Is there a way to set the SettingSchedule on a EnsLib.File.PassthroughService at 9:00 am to 9:30 am but only end of the month? 

I can START and STOP a business process via its Schedule setting.

Is it possible to change the value of another Setting in an analogous way?

I can imagine a SettingSchedule that could look like 

action:YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[,action:YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss]

But rather than just START or STOP, action could be "SET Setting = value", overriding whatever the normal value is.

Is there an existing way of achieving this kind of functionality?

I've got a business process that triggers from a scheduled task, and sends documents to a downstream system according to business requirements.

For those of you who still use the Studio IDE for ObjectScript programming and are going through the process of migrating to VS Code, did you know there's a section in the VS Code documentation just for you? Have a look at the Migrating from Studio chapter. It covers:

• Server-side editing and source control
• Studio projects
• Importing server definitions from the Windows Registry
• Loading Studio snippets and syntax colors

And now there's a new section, Keyboard Shortcuts, that shows you the VS Code equivalent for shortcuts you may be used to, so your hands never have to leave the keyboard.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

The following code downloads https://www.intersystems.com/assets/intersystems-logo.png and saves the file as c:\temp\test.png.

You need to define an SSL configuration called SSLTEST before executing this code

ClassMethodAs%Status

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Temporary globals stored in the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are used when a process does not need to store data indefinitely, but requires the powerful performance of globals. The IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are not journaled, so using temporary globals does not create journal files.

The system uses the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases for temporary storage and are available to users for the same.

For more information about temporary globals and the IRISTEMP database, see the following document:
Temporary Globals and the IRISTEMP Database

The globals used as temporary are:

1. System temporary globals (^IRIS.Temp*, ^%cspSession, ^CacheTemp*, ^mtemp*, etc.)
2. Temporary globals mapped to IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP by the user
3. 

InterSystems FAQ rubric

If you do not specify the option to remove the mirror attribute of the mirror database when deleting the mirror configuration, the database cannot be restored to a normal state and will be mounted read-only the next time it is mounted. To restore the database to a read-write state, you must remove the mirror attribute using the system routine ^MIRROR.

As a part of the IRIS Python 2024 contest, my colleague Damir and I went with an idea to build a platform called ShelterShare for connecting victims and volunteers for shelter requests . To do so we chose django as a framework and proceeded to build the first version with 3 different docker containers, django, iris and nginx which would then utilize IRIS as a pure Database engine via the beautifly composed django_iris (cudos to Dimitry). As we were progressing fast, we decided to explore the option of running it within the same container as IRIS by utilizing WSGI added in 2024.1.

There are two great WRC best practice articles Ensemble Orphaned Messages | InterSystems Developer Community | Best
 and the delete helper post DeleteHelper - A Class to Help with Deleting Referenced Persistent Classes (intersystems.com)
that go into orphaned records and how to deal with orphans.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Here, we will introduce a sample code for registering and referencing task schedules.

 ①Sample of task schedule registration

*Create a task to execute do ^TEST every day at 1:00 am. 

 set task=##class(%SYS.Task).%New()
 set task.Name="MyTask1"
 set taskDescription="Execute ^xxx every day at 1:00 AM" // Optional
 set task.NameSpace="USER"
 set task.TimePeriod=0
 set task.DailyFrequency=0
 set task.DailyFrequencyTime=""
 set task.DailyIncrement=""
 set task.DailyStartTime=$ZTimeh("01:00:00")
 set task.DailyEndTime=""
 set task.TaskClass="%SYS.Task.RunLegacyTask"
 set task.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To compile class routines including the mapped modifier, specify the compiler modifier "/mapped=1" or "/mapped". For example, do the following:

[Example 1] Get the class list and compile 

 do$System

[Example 2] Compile all classes 

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Use the ErrorList query of the SYS.ApplicationError class.

• Note 1: Runs in the %SYS namespace.
• Note 2: This is a non-stored utility, so we use the %ResultSet class rather than %SQL.Statement.

An example of command execution is as follows.

USER>set$namespace

The following shows how to get column values ​​of a SELECT while navigating through rows.

To move to a row, use the Next() method (which returns 1 if the row exists).

To get a column, use Get("column name").