#Tips & Tricks

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.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

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

1. Create a routine like this:

InterSystems FAQ rubric

If the journal file is too large to be searched or filtered using the Management Portal, you can refer to it using the following two methods.

① How to use the ^JRNDUMP utility
② How to reference it in a program

================================================== ==========

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!

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 .

I came up with a challenge for myself to come up with a way to make a variable watch itself for a certain value and do something when it hits that value without having to check it every time something touches it. Basically, a way to say "if at any point during the execution of this code, if x = 0 (or whatever the condition is) do this thing." The class I ended up with watches a %Status:

In our previous article, we explored how to send emails through Microsoft 365 using the Graph API. Since then, an anonymous client reached out to me about setting up some other methods of notifications through that API.

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.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To disable the timeout, set the query timeout to disabled in the DSN settings:

Windows Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Data Sources (ODBC) > System DSN configuration

If you check Disable query timeout, the timeout will be disabled.

If you want to change it on the application side, you can set it at the ODBC API level.

Set the SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT attribute when calling the ODBC SQLSetStmtAttr function before connecting to the data source.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

If you want to raise an arbitrary custom error in a TRY block, you can pass an exception with a throw as follows. In the following example, a custom error is raised if Stcount is less than 1.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can use the List query of the %SYS.Audit to output audit logs programmatically.

The sample code is as follows:

InterSystems FAQ rubric

When you run a routine in the terminal and an error occurs in the program, if you have not set the error trap properly, the program will enter debug mode as shown below.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

$ZTIMESTAMP returns the date and time in UTC format, so to change it to the local time zone, use the following system method:

$SYSTEM.Util.UTCtoLocalWithZTIMEZONE($ZTIMESTAMP)

The above output will be in the format ddddd,sssss.fff.

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.

The procedure is as follows (execute in the %SYS namespace):