(It's probably obvious, but if you want an accurate value on or around the actual birthday, then it's a lot more complex than dividing by 365.25. You have to go down to splitting and comparing months and days, especially in a leap year.)

Hello. I'm afraid objectscript does not have the exact equivalent of the Java/C# LOCK command.
As far as re-entrant in the same process goes: there is no need, as objectscript has no ability to parallel process in one process. It's a "simple", interpreted language with effectively one thread (though the interpreter itself is another matter).

What is worse (maybe) is the way programmers prevent problems with concurrency is "by convention only". Our lock command puts entries in a shared "lock table", and that is then available for other processors to read to see if something else is using it. But it can be ignored, unlike in Java. See  https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20251/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GCOS_lockbasics#GCOS_lockbasics_uses_activity_blocking

(By the way, I personally think there's no need to use "device opening" these days as modern systems usually make a good job of cleaning up the lock table when something goes wrong.)

Hi everyone,

That stored procedure solution looks great, and may work, but I'd just like to point out that you have no control over what order the rows are in when the method is called. That's going to be decided by the compiler.

If you've done "ORDER BY Date DESC" then it could build a temporary index by date and then run through that to extract the output, so row 4 would be processed first and the call to the method will return "New" instead of "Old".

Putting in the required order in the query might work, but even then, you have no certainty what the compiler will do. You either need a subquery, or calculate the column outside of SQL when you pull the rows (in the right order).

Regards,

Mike

Assuming all the classes are identical in both namespaces, then I think you can just copy over the underlying global arrays that hold the table data. You'll need to know a bit about the naming rules, etc. to find the globals, and a bit of programming to clear them out in the target beforehand. (The classes could be copied over separately.) If the namespaces are on the same network, and the tables small, then Merge commands could be used.

All I can think of is the timeout setting. The documentation says it should be in seconds, i.e. an integer, but you have "PT30S" which might be treated as zero?

Hi,

After many years of development and support I've become wary of one-line requests. 🤔 I wonder why you need this (Five whys - Wikipedia). For example, if you are trying to debug a mysterious state in a background job then maybe you just need "D LOG^%ETN" to store the variables in the error log. Or, at least you could look in there for ways to use $ORDER and $QUERY  to scan local variables without involving ^SPOOL (or, as we once did, opening a file to ZW to, closing, and then reading it back).

Hi. Not entirely sure what you mean, but I usually write a noddy test routine to clear variables, set up objects and properties, run methods, display, compare results, etc. Have it open in Studio alongside the classes being edited. Then call from terminal. Note that to save typing <ctrl>P can be used to get the previous entries at the command line (and <ctrl>N for next) and allow editing. Alternatively, for repeated test cases I often just copy and paste code from Word or OneNote. / Mike

Hi. You say the codebase is over 30 years old. Well, I have a solution from 1991...

The PAS system I (still) work on has some standard search and display ("code list") software that has to return all codes "starting with", but it's not pretty. As the starting point for the $O() it does this:

; Return a string immediately preceding input in collating sequence (returns null if input is null); ABC becomes ABB||, -1 becomes -1.0000000001, -.1 becomes .1000000001, 0 becomes -.0000000001, .1 becomes .0999999999, 1 becomes 0.9999999999
SEED(A)	Q:A=""""; null string
	I '$$NUMERIC(A) S LEN=$L(A),T=$E(A,1,LEN-1)_$C($A($E(A,LEN))-1)_"||"Q T
	Q A-(1E-10)

Since you know your target global only has non-numeric subscripts, you won't need to see the 5 lines of nastiness that is the NUMERIC call. :-) The end of your S SEED=$O(@CLGREF@(SEED)) is either the usual "", or ZIN'=$E(SEED,1,$L(ZIN))  (again ignoring the horrible code dealing with numeric values).

Apologies for the ancient coding style (not mine, but I wrote similar back then).  / Mike

Hi. If you mean the ODBC driver, then it gets installed when you install Cache. So, any Cache install file for that version has it. I don't know if you can select to only install the driver and nothing else as I always want the full lot on my PC.

(... just tried and a "custom" setup allows you to remove everything but the ODBC driver, but it's fiddly.)

Have you tried the old trick of running your code inside an execute (X) command? (I sometimes do that for code that only works in non-cache platforms, like DSM, to stop the cache compiler complaining.)

Hi. Interesting topic.

Why did you choose to become a software engineer / developer?

- Always had an interest in science and tech growing up. Introduced to programming at school and enjoyed it. When looking for a job, there was a programming one, so I chose it. And never looked back.

How and when did you start to generate a "flow state of mind" during your career?

- Again, always had it, I think. Give me a good programming problem and I can lose hours without noticing.

What are recommend habits inside and outside, during you own time and during your work time, to be focused during you coding session and daily tasks?

- As I'm lucky and it "just happens" I'm not sure I'm a good source of ideas on this. But at work I find it helps to try to stop other things breaking my concentration. So I will "clear the decks": very little in my email in tray (it all goes into "later" or is set up as a task, or done, or deleted) and all big things to do are recorded as tasks, and scheduled, so that I don't have that "I must remember to do x" popping into my head.

The hard part is avoiding interruptions like new emails and chats from colleagues. Sometimes I just don't notice them, though, as I'm in "flow". So the problem is the other way around: missing important, urgent stuff! Best to find/allocate time when I'm not expected to respond quickly. Often I split my day into two: first I'll do all the other stuff like emails, admin, training, meetings, etc. and as a reward, play with code later. :-)

When we've had license problems in the past, the WRC have supplied us with a routine that watches for the limit warnings and then does a one-off dump of what processes are running for later investigation. We also wrote our own code to do a snapshot of license usage to a file, which is called by the Caché task manager at regular intervals so that we can analyze license usage over time. Helps when trying to see if the site needs more, or sometimes less, licenses. There's nothing like a good graph to prove your point. :-)

I'm no particular fan of this aspect of the language, but changing it as an "option" (by namespace?, routine?) would be a nightmare for maintenance. :-) Only recently fell foul of it with code like: IF type="X"!type="Y" ... that can never be true.
You could argue that it is at least very simple to understand. Just one rule to remember - left to right, except for brackets - rather than a precedence order for every single operation you might use!

Hi. Awful long time since I looked at that tool, but Michel is probably right: it's to do with how the lines are defined.  I have a vague memory that "multiline" was actually provided as an array, not one string with delimiters. And the simple top of the array had a line count, e.g.

remarks=2

remarks(1)="first line"

remarks(2)="last line"

But I could be wrong.  :-)  Try the help on that "options" field.  / Mike

Hi. This was a few years ago, but we could not find any way to do this in the standard Ensemble set up at the time. The message viewer can be asked the right sort of questions, but then times out as the query takes too long.
For monthly stats we wrote embedded SQL in a class method that we ran at the command prompt. This wrote out the results as CSV to the terminal and once it finished we copied and pasted the various blocks into Excel. Very slow and manual, but only once a month so not so bad. (Our system only purged messages after many months.)
Then we wanted daily numbers to feed into another spreadsheet. So we built an Ensemble service running once a day that ran similar embedded SQL but only for the one previous day of messages. It put the CSV results into a stream in a custom message that went to an operation, that sent then emails out to a user-defined list. Essential bits below. Hope it helps.

    Set today = $ZDATE($H,3)_" 00:00:00"
    Set yesterday = $SYSTEM.SQL.DATEADD("day",-1,today)
    Set tRequest = ##class(xxx.Mess.Email).%New()
    Set tRequest.To = ..SendTo
...etc
    &sql(DECLARE C1 CURSOR FOR
    SELECT
          SUBSTRING(DATEPART('sts',TimeCreated) FROM 1 FOR 10),
          SourceBusinessType,
          SourceConfigName,
          TargetBusinessType,
          TargetConfigName,
          COUNT(*)
        INTO :mDate,...
        FROM Ens.MessageHeader
        WHERE TimeCreated >= :yesterday AND TimeCreated < :today
        GROUP BY...
        ORDER BY...
    )
    &sql(OPEN C1)
    &sql(FETCH C1)
    While (SQLCODE = 0) {
        Set tSC = tRequest.Attachment.WriteLine(mDate_","_...
        &sql(FETCH C1)
    }
    &sql(CLOSE C1)
    Set tSC = ..SendRequestAsync($ZStrip(..TargetConfigName,"<>W"),tRequest) If $$$ISERR(tSC)...

Hi. The team I work in has been supporting old MUMPS and then Cache systems for many years, and have two rules for fixing data on live systems:

1. Never write a kill statement directly at the command line.
It's quick and convenient, but we've seen many occasions  where big chunks of, or, before the database parameter to stop it, whole globals were removed by accident. Cue major panics, hours of restore and de-journal. etc.

2. Don't write SQL updates directly (SMP, command line, etc).

Because if you get the WHERE wrong then all rows in a table suddenly vanish or have the same value. :-)

So we use a local command line tool for global amendments that uses the old %G style selection search to display one node at a time, so that you can then edit the data, or kill (with a warning first if there are sub nodes you may have forgotten about).

We also have a local command line tool for SQL/objects. This takes in a table name and WHERE clause, and only allows editing and deleting when the query finds only one row.

Anything more than a few nodes/rows and we usually write a proper bit of script on our dev server, and get it checked and tested before running in live. Better safe than sorry.

By the way, in the original post the example Output should have a space between "Foxtrot" and ",".

I'm not going to win, but I thought I'd try a slightly different approach. With thanks to others for the clever $P part.

ClassMethod N(i As %String, p As %String = "") As %String{Q $S(i="":"",1:$S(".,?!"[$E(i):p_$E(i),i?1A.E:p_$ZCVT($E(i),"U")_$P("lfa7ravo7harlie7elta7cho7oxtrot7olf7otel7ndia7uliett7ilo7ima7ike7ovember7scar7apa7uebec7omeo7ierra7ango7niform7ictor7hiskey7ray7ankee7ulu",7,$A($E(i))#32),1:"")_..N($E(i,2,*)," "))

Size: 252

I claim the least number of lines - 1 - and least commands - 1 - and probably the least variables - 2.

Could do without the second input param if you allow a leading space in the output (not mentioned in requirements, but fails for the example output, etc.). I also noticed that the sizing does not include the ClassMethod... line, so you could reduce it by moving strings to default values for input variables, but I think that's much like the other comments that involved moving the implementation outside the method completely, just cheating the counting mechanism rather than solving the problem. :-)

It's Friday afternoon, so I thought I'd play with a variation that avoids $Query. This is for no particular reason, as I think the $Q solution is fine, but I wondered if I could:

ClassMethod Flatten(ByRef array, ref = "array") As %List [ PublicList = array ]{S sub="",list=""F {S sub=$O(@ref@(sub),1,data)I sub="" QI $G(data)'="" {S line=""F i=1:1:$QLength(ref) S line=line_$LB($QSubscript(ref,i))S list=list_$LB($LB(data)_line_$LB(sub))}I $D(@ref@(sub))\10 { ; if there are deeper nodes, go downS nextRef=$S(ref["(":$E(ref,1,*-1)_",""",1:ref_"(""")_sub_""")"S list=list_..Flatten(.array,nextRef)}}Return list}

It's recursive, which is dangerous but powerful stuff! :-)  Call it by something like: S out=..Flatten(.in)

It also avoids output variables in the parameter list, which I find confusing and against Uncle Bob's clean coding principals (okay, he'd also be horrified by "S" for "set", but I'm old-school). Instead, it returns a list of lists which is just as easy to step through. / Mike

Hi. I've never come across any automatic conversion from character user interface (CHUI) to any web-based one. You might stand a chance if the screens were written in some sort of "screen generator" framework, but most I've seen are basically hand-coded, and the problem is that they work on a field-by-field basis. So they read one field, validate input, update bits of the screen and data, and then move to the next field. This does not match well with web pages that tend to work a screen at a time, so automatic conversion is impossible. Sorry about that. I'd like to be proved wrong, of course - maybe some of the systems I work on could be converted! Anyone?