#VSCode

As you have probably noticed, online product documentation has advanced tremendously in the last few years. Among numerous improvements under the hood, documentation has become easier to read and navigate. And we now have a powerful search engine that gets you to what you need more accurately than we could ever do with the old system of shipping documentation in the product. While most of you have probably had nothing but positive impacts on your workflows, it has come to my attention that some of you may be having a slight problem accessing custom class documentation.

I know that people who are completely new to VS Code, Git, Docker, FHIR, and other tools can sometimes struggle with setting up the environment. So I decided to write an article that walks through the entire setup process step by step to make it easier to get started.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment at the end - let me know if the instructions were clear, if anything was missing, or if there’s anything else you'd find helpful.

The setup includes:

✅ VS Code – Code editor
✅ Git – Version control system
✅ Docker – Runs an instance of IRIS for Health Community
✅ VS Code REST Client Extension – For running FHIR API queries
✅ Python – For writing FHIR-based scripts
✅ Jupyter Notebooks – For AI and FHIR assignments

Before you begin: Ensure you have administrator privileges on your system.

In addition to reading the guide, you can also follow the steps in the videos:

For Windows

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyvuHbxCwCY
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Strap on this jetpack to boost your developer experience in Visual Studio Code.

DX Jetpack for VS Code was my entry for the 2023 Developer Tools Contest, where it achieved 2nd place in the Experts vote and 5th place in the Community vote. It is an extension pack for VS Code, bundling three entirely new extensions created by me, plus a couple that we at George James Software published previously.

The new extensions are:

• gj :: codeSpex
• ObjectScript Class View
• ServerDiff

If you're reluctant to install DX Jetpack right away, why not try it using a dev container? In the dev container is an InterSystems IRIS Community environment augmented with InterSystems Package Manager (IPM) and the isc-codetidy package.

InterSystems has also released IRIS as containerized deployments. This post is to demonstrate how InterSystems IRIS and applications those rely on IRIS a backend can be packaged into an image and be run in other machines in containers and how simple it is to do that.

A container runs image/s which have all the necessary executables, binary code, libraries, and configuration files. And the images can be moved from one machine to another, and an images repository like Docker Hub can simplify that process.

I have used an application from Open Exchange for this demo.

On 2024-08-29, the team released Language Server v2.6.0, which includes more improvements for code completion (aka intellisense). That means that #dim, while still useful, is hardly necessary anymore. That's a good thing in my opinion.

When you use VS Code to edit source code, the settings model allows you to specify folder-specific values for some settings by using a settings.json file located in a .vscode sub-folder of the workspace root folder. A value set here takes precedence over one from your personal settings when you are working within that workspace root folder.

Server Manager 3.0 Preview, my entry for the InterSystems Security Contest, is now making use of a cool new feature of Visual Studio Code version 1.63 - support for pre-release extensions.

Hello everyone, I’m a French student in academical exchange for my fifth year of engineering school and here is my participation in the FHIR for Women's Health contest.

This project is supposed to be seen as the backend of a bigger application. It can be plugged into a Front End app and help you gather information from your patients. It will read your data in local and use a Data Transformation to make it into a FHIR object before sending it to the included local FHIR server.

One of the most useful features in Studio is code snippets.

Here's how to add snippets to VSCode.

Here's a generalized instructions.

1. Go to File - Preferences - User Snippets and choose objectscript.

2. Add your snippet, here's an example:

SQLTools is a Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Extension with over 3.5 million downloads that provides connections to many of the most used databases, including InterSystems IRIS, using drivers.

This scenario showed up yesterday at a client site when I was delivering bespoke consultation on migration from Studio to VS Code.

On a default VS Code installation, when you create a new file its language mode is 'Plain Text'

You have to click there to set another mode.

Luckily, there's a setting you can tweak to change this. It is called files.defaultLanguage

Set it to the ID of the language you want. Those IDs display in parentheses after each entry on the language mode selector.

We're hosting our Deltanji and Serenji user group session tomorrow - there's still time to register, if you haven't already.

We'll be showcasing some advanced features of Deltanji and Serenji in VS Code with time for a discussion - so feel free to bring along any problems you need help solving or share your feedback on our tools. We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're interested in our tools this is a great chance to hear what others have to say, as well as asking your own questions.

Date: Wednesday, November 3rd

Time: 11-12pm EDT / 3-4pm GMT.

Let us know you'll be attending on Eventbrite.

We hope to see you tomorrow, but if you're unable to make it you can email me at laurelj@georgejames.com and I can share a recording of the session.

Headache-free stored objects: a simple example of working with InterSystems Caché objects in ObjectScript and Python

Neuschwanstein Castle

Tabular data storages based on what is formally known as the relational data model will be celebrating their 50th anniversary in June 2020. Here is an official document – that very famous article. Many thanks for it to Doctor Edgar Frank Codd. By the way, the relational data model is on the list of the most important global innovations of the past 100 years published by Forbes.

On the other hand, oddly enough, Codd viewed relational databases and SQL as a distorted implementation of his theory. For general guidance, he created 12 rules that any relational database management system must comply with (there are actually 13 rules). Honestly speaking, there is zero DBMS's on the market that observes at least Rule 0. Therefore, no one can call their DBMS 100% relational :) If you know any exceptions, please let me know.