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Hi Interoperability experts!

Recently noticed an interesting conceptual discussion in our Interoperability Discord channel to which I want to give more exposure.

All we know that typical InterSystems Interoperability production consists of the following chain:

Inbound adapter->Business Service->Business Process->Business Operation->Outbound adapter.

And Business Process (BO) here is always considered as a passive "listener" either on port/folder/rest API for an incoming data.

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Hi folks!

I'm playing with IRIS interoperability at the moment and it turned out that Data Transformation cannot be the element of production by itself.

It can be called either from data rule or from business process.

But why?

What if I just want to change the message with the transformation and transfer the message somewhere else? Why the overhead with Rule or Business process?

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Hi folks!

We have a bunch of templates on OEX that provide a handy foundation for building a particular application with IRIS. And the basic principle of each and every template is that we take vanilla IRIS images, load code, and files into the image using Dockerfile, and create a new docker image as a solution. And then we develop running this image and rebuilding it when returning to development.

Some developers ask me why we need to build the docker image to work with the code. Indeed, if at the end of the day I need to develop a ZPM package and not a docker image why don't run the vanilla image and load the code and everything in it?

The problem I have with the building image approach is that often I can wait a lot to build an image and it fails on some Objectscript problem in the source that I cannot fix as the image is not building. and

Any thoughts? How do you develop with docker?

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Discussion
· Dec 28, 2021
On Datasets Licensing

Hi developers!

We launched the datasets contest.

And one of the important questions that need to be covered is dataset licensing.

There are two general cases:

a) a dataset you take from another place in public Internet or private network/person.

b) a dataset you create by yourself or own for any other reason.

We decided to follow the principles and considerations that data.world site introduces for datasets' licensing.

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Hi, Community!

Open Exchange (OEX) is getting more and more popular and more and more developers consider publishing their apps in the public package manager registry.

This is really great!

So the topic of thoughtful naming convention is getting more important and even critical. Let's discuss?

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Hi Developers!

Thank you for using ZPM Package Manager and contributing more and more useful packages to the public registry!

But as you already aware ZPM packages are always deployed with source code.

Do you think we need to add the option to deploy without source code - e.g. if you want to deploy a commercial package?

Will you develop commercial modules if there will be an option and deploy it with ZPM?

How do you deploy commercial applications today?

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Hi Developers!

Want to raise security discussion today!

Let's discuss how InterSystems security for applications works. In general, the concept is clear: we have Resources (what to protect), Roles which combine a set of privileges and accesses to Resources and Users which can have this or that Role.

But there is also a concept of Application which also could have a Role.

So you either provide a Role for a User or for an Application.

What do you use in production? What is your strategy and why? Pros, cons?

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Discussion
· Sep 28, 2020
%Status usage in ObjectScript

Hi developers!

Want to discuss with you the case of %Status.

If you familiar with ObjectScript you know what is it. I'd love to hear the history of the case why it had appeared in ObjectScript but it turned out that almost every system/library classmethods return %Status and there is a whole set of tools to deal with it.

What is does it gives you the responsibility to check the value or %Status of every system method you call.

E.g. if you save the data of the persistent class, you should never call like this:

do obj.%Save()

you need to call:

set sc=obj.%Save()

if $$$ISERR(sc) do // something or quit.

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Discussion
· Sep 21, 2020
Unit Testing Naming Convention

Hi Developers!

Recently we discussed the naming convention on packages we deploy and even made some choices.

Here I want to have a conversation on the naming convention for unit tests.

Of course, we wish every good library has unit tests. Here is the documentation and some good articles(one, two, three) regarding it on the Developer Community.

Let's decide on the naming of UnitTests packages?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will all start with the UnitTest package name.

E.g. if your library's class name is:

johndoe.lib.class

The related unit test class will be:

UnitTest.johndoe.lib.class

What about folders?

The suggestion is that unit test classes will live separately from source classes, e.g. in /tests directory.

Here is the example of a repository with unit tests that are named and placed according to the proposal.

What do you think?

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Hi Devs!

A few months ago I raised a discussion on the naming convention for ZPM modules.

And you free to put your name or your organization name for the packages you want to have your personal or company's brand.

But if you contribute to community, we suggested to have "community." package for all such libraries.

But the name is too long.

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Hi Developers!

Recently we updated the look and feel of articles on DC:

The font is bigger, with no ads on aside.

Articles look like that now:

The intent was to make reading process for articles more focused cause sometimes we want to share a deeper thought with article and this needs more concentration and less distraction.

Do you like it?

Share your thoughts, please?

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Hi Developers!

Often we need to use relatively small arrays with constants, static arrays in algorithms, etc where we need to do something with each element of an array. There are several ways to deal with it in ObjectSctipt.

Previously I used to use globals, locals, PPG for this but not so long time ago figured out that %List is a way too handy.

Indeed, suppose we have an array of months and need to set up and use it in our code.

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Hi Developers!

InterSystems IRIS stores everything in globals and if we use ObjectScript classes to persist data class documents globals it uses in storage. But if you use globals for calculations, temporary storages, for special indexes or for some other purposes - how do you document it?

Possible options which come to my mind:

1. Macro

#define Array ^MyGlobal

usage:

s $$$Array(1)=1

2. Class parameter

Parameter Array ="^MyGlobal";

Usage:

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Hi Community!

Sometimes I meet a method which accepts 10+ parameters.

And often I need only the 8th parameter to pass. And I call the method something like:

do ##class(Some.Feature).Method(,,,,,,,"flag")

And I don't like this method when I call it like this cause, you know, often I just miss the number of commas and raise some other flag I wanted.

How do you avoid this situations?

If you meet such a code, how do you call it and sure that you didn't miss the number of ","?

What is a good number of parameters in a method and f you need to pass more parameters in a method what do you do?

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Hi Community!

There are two general ways to execute arbitrary SQL in serverside ObjectScript code: EmbeddedSQL and ObjectScript SQL a.k.a. Dynamic SQL.

E.g. if we want to get the value of the property of instance with a certain ID using SQL we can do:

&sql(SELECT Name INTO :name FROM Sample.Person WHERE ID=1)

write name

Same result with %SQL.Statement:

set rs=##class(%SQL.Statement).%ExecDirect(,"SELECT Name as name FROM Sample.Person where ID=1")
  do rs.%Next()
  write rs.name

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