New post

#Tips & Tricks

19

Pieces of experience in InterSystems Technology which solve some particular problem in elegant or unusual way.

Article
· Mar 2, 2017 1m read
Trusting the code you import

As more people join Developer Community, and with increasing efforts to promote code sharing, I'd like to draw fresh attention to this post I wrote a year ago. It spotlights a feature within the class compiler which is both useful and dangerous. When importing code (e.g. from an XML export of classes received from someone), it's worth considering the risks.

Even if that post doesn't seem relevant to you at the moment you may wish to note it for the future. A handy way of doing this is to click the star icon at the end of it.

2 1
0 276
Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: The inconspicuous Menu button

Amongst the large fonts and chunky icons of Portal's pages, the Menu button in the top left corner is easily overlooked:

When clicked, it often produces the following menu:

When I remember it's there, I find the "View Console Log" option particularly handy.

I wrote "often" above because I've also noticed that the Menu contents change when I'm on a page within the Ensemble section of Portal:

4 1
0 520
Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Feel at home on the Home page

Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:

If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.

On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you.

3 0
0 400
Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Use the search box

User interfaces such as Portal often give us multiple ways of doing a task. Sometimes we stick with habits and don't realize that another way might save us time.

Here's one that I learned by watching someone else using Portal.

Use the Search box to get quickly to a page that may otherwise be several layers deep in the Portal hierarchy. For example, suppose I want to check the status of the ECP networking:

2 3
0 290
This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)
6 23
1 1.3K

Points to remember before you start:

  1. It is not possible in a COS (Caché Object Script) job/process context to have multiple Named Pipes. It is a one Named Pipe per job/process limited line of communication.
  1. Named Pipes, in Caché, like most pipes on most operating systems are Unidirectional. That means you open them for either Read or Write, but not both.
3 0
0 681
Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
14 4
1 1.5K

Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

14 0
5 5.7K

I tried to make atelier look more like XCODE with this simple trick or tip: change the default font to SF Mono and size 14.

To do it I did:

1) Install SF Mono font in the system which is the default font for XCODE and needs to be installed in order to use it.

You can find it in: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts

Double Click SFMono-Regular.otf file and install it. You will get a warning of "serious problems" but it will work all right.

0 0
0 463

What is a core file? and When are they use­ful?

The in­for­ma­tion in this doc­u­ment is cur­rent as ver­sions of In­ter­Sys­tems prod­ucts re­leased through 2019–06–30. This up­date cov­ers er­rors in that have been dis­cov­ered up to 2023-01-12, but not changes present in new ver­sions of In­ter­Sys­tems prod­ucts.

Nev­er­the­less, the de­tails for ex­ist­ing prod­ucts are not sub­ject to fre­quent change.

8 1
2 32.9K

In this post I would like to talk about the syslog table. I will cover what it is, how you look at it, what the entries really are, and why it may be important to you. The syslog table can contain important diagnostic information. If your system is having any problems, it is important to understand how to look at this table and what information is contained there.

15 1
1 2.4K

This post is meant to provide a quick possible explanation for a very perplexing problem.

Scenario: You’ve just created your own administrative user in your 2014.1 (or later) instance of Caché. You gave it every possible security role (including %All), so it should in theory be able to do anything within the instance.

You’ve written a very advanced routine with a break command in it for debugging:

7 1
0 457

After reading Stephen Wilson's article "Windows 7 performs shutdown too fast for Cache to close and so it gets forced down" I've recalled another solution that was based on Local Group Policy, which allows to control extra actions that should occur on computer startup or shutdown. How to add a computer shutdown script is well documented in MS Technet article.

7 1
0 952
Article
· Oct 27, 2016 1m read
Ensemble's Workflow Inbox portal

Hi - If you want to embed Ensemble's Workflow Inbox, (that offers workflow task items to workflow users) inside of your application - you can access the URL directly without necessarily giving users access to the Management Portal - but more importantly, you can strip away the Titlebar, Worklists and Borders that make up the page by default.

You do this by using the same URL parameters you would use, if embedding a regular DeepSee dashboard into your application.

For example, adding &EMBED=1 at the end of the URL as depicted below:

0 0
0 371
Article
· Oct 4, 2016 1m read
How to Parse a URL in Caché

How to parse a URL in Caché:

Let's pretend you are working on a project where you may be retrieving a URL for some purpose and you have the need to be easily able to parse apart that URL to get the various components that make up the URL.

Here's how to do that:

2 8
0 1.7K
Article
· Aug 31, 2016 1m read
DeepSee cubes building troubleshooting

Hi!

Sometimes you see that call to DeepSee cube building method:

w ##class(%DeepSee.Utils).%BuildCube("CubeName")

does nothing.

Here are my 2 cents on possible reasons.

1. Run DeepSee Reset method in certain Namespace:

NAMESPACE> w ##class(%DeepSee.Utils).%Reset()

and try again.

2. Make sure, that all the indices in your base class for the cube are rebuilt, rebuild them and run it again:

1 2
0 372

Checking if Directory or File Exists:

Outlined below is an example of how to check if a directory exists:

Set directoryName="c:\temp\nosuchdir"

/* Check for existence of a directory - Return Value:  0 - directory does not exist;  1 - directory does exist  */

Set directoryExists=##class(%File).DirectoryExists(directoryName)

If ('directoryExists)  // do the processing for when a directory does not exist


Outlined below is an example of how to check if a file exists:

3 1
0 2.8K

We're developing Ensemble PoC and one day our frontend developer (who doesn't have Ensemble production running) said that Populate just doesn't cut it and he needs to see the real data. He needed only one object, but the problem was - it's a big object. Still, I checked ids of everything related and wrote this command (parts omitted, but you get the idea):

2 1
0 652