It was my answer to the question appeared in GoogleGroups. And when I answered there I figured out that it might worth to post an article and to add some light on how Unicode is stored in Caché.
If you have an app that uses some Caché client Windows components that are not included into CacheODBC distribution (e.g. CacheActiveX.dll), you need to proceed Caché client installation on end user's client computers and/or MS Terminal Servers. Being a part of Caché client's installation, Caché Cube is installed along with other components and is autostarted with every user's session. So, it becomes visible to every user.
To make it completely invisible, you can just move CACHE.lnk file from
If you are facing out the license expire warning message on your terminal ("*** Warning: This Cache license will expire in 3 days ***") and you do not want that message to be displayed, you can disable/enable that by rinning the following commands:
Twilio is a great tool for programmatically initiating and managing phone calls. In this example we'll go over basic account setup, create a Cache Class to manage our interaction with the Twilio API, and initiate a phone call from the Cache Terminal.
The full Class used in this example is available on GitHub as well.
I wanted to share a little tidbit which is in the Studio documentation (http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?...) but many people who have been using the InterSystems Studio for a long time missed the addition of this *very* useful feature, and every time I mention this to an audience I see at least one face light up because of how excited they are to learn about it!
Within Studio, the Output pane (View -> Output) is actually misnamed. It is actually an Input/Output window which can be used to run Caché ObjectScript commands!
In this article I would like to tell you about macros in InterSystems Caché. A macro is a symbolic name that is replaced with a set of instructions during compilation. A macro can “unfold” in various instruction sets each time it is called, depending on the parameters passed to it and activated scenarios. This can be both static code and the result of ObjectScript execution. Let's take a look at how you can use them in your application.
Caché offers a number of methods for going through a collection and doing something with its elements. The easiest method uses a while-loop and lets you fulfill the task in an imperative manner. The developer needs to take care of the iterator, jumping to the next element and checking if the loop is within the collection.
Recently I was conducting a remote support session with a site. The desktop they were sharing with me was on a PC configured with German as the native language. Since my German is rather rusty, and virtually non-existent when it comes to computing terms, I was glad to be able to switch the Portal session into English.
This is done from the page that appears when you use the About link:
I'm looking for some field experiences, lessons learned, or actual deployed solutions to the problem of replicating non-CACHE.DAT data in a mirrored Cache environment.
Prompted by this post about accessing a global at its original location after you have changed a mapping, here's a tip about one specific dropdown in Portal that's sometimes useful.
If your application is raising <PROTECT> errors and you're finding it hard to work out why, here's a way to get additional information.
First, if auditing is not already enabled, turn it on:
Then use "Configure System Events" (highlighted above) and locate the event named %System/%Security/Protect. In the screenshot below I used the Filter field to do this (type "protect" - highlighted below - and press TAB):
It's almost time to get your customers upgraded to new versions - are you worried about showing off your SQL Performance after upgrades? If you want to upgrade without worrying, then I have just the program for you!!! Check out this video from Global Summit 2016 featuring yours truly explaining how to upgrade a system without worrying about pesky SQL queries showing on your waistline!
Prior to 2017.1, whenever I created a new namespace using Portal on Ensemble or HealthShare it was automatically configured to host productions. This used to irritate me, because sometimes I'm setting up a namespace (for example, to host our Deltanji tool) that doesn't need the extra Ensemble baggage.
Sometimes I observe people scrolling manually down to the bottom of the Console Log document when they want to see the most recent messages. So I want to draw attention to the handy link that does the job for you in a single click:
If you deal with multiple instances of Caché / Ensemble / HealthShare and sometimes have to work at the Terminal command prompt, did you know that you can easily add extra information to that prompt which may help prevent you running a command on the wrong instance?
Inspired by the article "Declarative development in Caché" that's still trending on the dev com. The OP explored a functional style of iterating over a collection. A comment today suggested "Caché would need syntax support for anonymous functions".
With Macros you can kind of get anonymous like syntax using dot notation.
This is not production code, but it does work. First the macros...
This article assumes that you are familiar with Zabbix and SNMP monitoring, if not, there are some very interesting posts on the Community, especially this one (https://community.intersystems.com/post/creating-custom-snmp-oids) which contains a lot of information on how to configure and request an SNMP Cache server.
In case you've never used the "About" link at the top of Management Portal, here's a screenshot of the kind of information it shows. I've highlighted the link and some of the information I find it handy to get from here.
A feature I recently used in working on ISC internal applications is the ability to send emails on behalf of someone. This is useful when generating system notifications from an application when you want some of them to show up as being from a specific person, perhaps posting comments on a work ticket.
In my case I was updating our facilities work order system for tracking requests. Normally all notification emails are sent from the same noreply email address. I wanted to change that so comments added from the original requester would show up as being from them and stand out.
By default, Analyzer executes queries as components are added. Often, there are times where you may know exactly what you are looking to do, and you do not want Analyzer to execute 5 queries as you drag and drop items onto rows/columns and select your filters. This is where toggling Auto-execute off can help.
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.
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.
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:
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.)
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