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For my hundredth article on the Developer Community, I wanted to present something practical, so here's a comprehensive implementation of the GPG Interoperability Adapter for InterSystems IRIS.

Every so often, I would encounter a request for some GPG support, so I had several code samples written for a while, and I thought to combine all of them and add missing GPG functionality for a fairly complete coverage. That said, this Business Operation primarily covers data actions, skipping management actions such as key generation, export, and retrieval as they are usually one-off and performed manually anyways. However, this implementation does support key imports for obvious reasons. Well, let's get into it.

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When you deploy code from a repo, class (file) deletion might not be reflected by your CICD system.
Here's a simple one-liner to automatically delete all classes in a specified package that have not been imported. It can be easily adjusted for a variety of adjunct tasks:

set packages = "USER.*,MyCustomPackage.*"
set dir = "C:\InterSystems\src\"
set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.LoadDir(dir,"ck", .err, 1, .loaded)
set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.Delete(packages _ ",'" _ $LTS($LI($LFS(loaded_",",".cls,"), 1, *-1), ",'"),, .err2)

The first command compiles classes and also returns a list of loaded classes. The second command deletes all classes from specified packages, except for the classes loaded just before that.

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Article
· May 24, 2024 15m read
VIP in GCP

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

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Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.
Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period.
The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

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Article
· Feb 7, 2024 2m read
Splitting access by WebServer port

Recently, I needed to run WebGateway on an additional port but with a twist - this port should publish only one web application.
At first, I thought about configuring Web Gateway to allow only specific web applications (~urls), but Web Gateway configuration is per Apache configuration:

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Article
· Dec 19, 2023 8m read
VIP in Azure

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in Azure, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to Azure, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in Azure as subnets can span several zones). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without the using Load Balancers suggested in most other Azure reference architectures.

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If you work with Productions, highlighting connections between Business Hosts is a very convenient feature, allowing developers to get a visual representation of a data flow.

This feature works by default with all system Business Hosts. If a user writes their own Business Services, Processes, or Operations, they must implement the OnGetConnections method for this functionality to work with their custom Business Hosts (or use Ens.DataType.ConfigName properties for connections).
That said, the SMP shows only the first layer of connections of the selected Business Host. Sometimes, we need to get connections of connections recursively to build a complete data flow graph. Or we might need this connection information to check which downstream systems might be affected by a change upstream.

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Recently I needed to restore a version of a production class, which was overwritten by compilation and running UpdateProduction. As the correct version was unavailable in the source control, I used journals to restore the data. Journals store a plethora of information about what's happening in the system and are quite a powerful tool. This article explains how to work with journals to extract the data you require.

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Article
· May 23, 2023 1m read
Production settings

When developing interoperability productions, it might be useful to have settings outside of a Business Host. The primary reason is when you need a setting to affect several different Business Hosts and want to guarantee that the value is the same. While System Default Settings can be used to propagate settings for Business Hosts, they can be changed by overriding the value on a BH level (although the advantage of Business Host settings set via SDS is that they don't need custom code which our current approach requires).
Another reason is when you need to affect non-setting parts of the Business Host configuration (PoolSize, Enabled, etc.)

We will be adding an env setting to a production.

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Article
· May 18, 2023 2m read
Code Golf: String Rotations

Let's have a round of Code Golf!

String rotation is when you take a word and move some of its letters to the end of the word, so the first letter becomes the second letter, the second letter becomes the third, and so on. Last letter becomes first. Rotation can happen only in one direction →.
Your task is to write a method that will receive two strings. It then must return an integer value of how many times needed to rotate the strings to be equal.
As usual shortest solution wins.

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Git stores complete history - meaning you would never lose your files, even if they are deleted, they are still available. That, however, presents an issue if large or sensitive files have been committed. Deleting them DOES NOT remove them from history. Recently one of the repos I work on became unexpectedly large, so here's how you can resolve that:

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In this article, we will establish an encrypted JDBC connection between Tableau Desktop and InterSystems IRIS database using a JDBC driver.
While documentation on configuring TLS with Java clients covers all possible topics on establishing an encrypted JDBC connection, configuring it with Tableau might be a little bit tricky, so I decided to write it down.

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Article
· Nov 4, 2022 9m read
VIP in AWS

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

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Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today, let's talk about interoperability.

Issue

When you have an active interoperability production, you have two separate process flows: a working production that processes messages and a CI/CD process flow that updates code, production configuration and system default settings.

Clearly, CI/CD process affects interoperability. But questions are:

  • What exactly happens during an update?
  • What do we need to do to minimize or eliminate production downtime during an update?
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InterSystems Native SDK for Python is a lightweight interface to InterSystems IRIS APIs that were once available only through ObjectScript.

I'm especially interested in the ability to call ObjectScript methods, class methods, to be precise. It works, and it works great, but by default, calls only support scalar arguments: strings, booleans, integers, and floats.

But if you want to:
- Pass or return structures, such as dicts or lists
- Pass or return streams

You'll need to write some glue code or take this project (installs with pip install edpy). edpy package gives you one simple signature:

call(iris, class_name, method_name, args)

which allows you to call any ObjectScript method and get results back.

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Function as a service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. Building an application following this model is one way of achieving a "serverless" architecture, and is typically used when building microservices applications.

Wikipedia

FaaS is an extremely popular approach to running workloads in the cloud, allowing developers to focus on writing code.

This article will show you how to deploy InterSystems IRIS methods in a FaaS way.

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