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John Murray · Jun 30, 2016

I don't need it, but my experience is that InterSystems consistently maintains a very high standard of technical and professional competence among its staff, so knowing that the author of a post or a response is a member of ISC staff may be useful to readers.

Additionally, an ISC person may find it helpful in the event that someone whose name they do not recognize as being a colleague posts something that might benefit from follow-up through internal channels.

Think of it as equivalent to the way in which Global Summit badges usually give a discreet indication that the wearer is a company employee.

John Murray · Jun 23, 2016

Glad to hear that System Defaults are working for them. My main gripe with that mechanism is how cumbersome Portal's UI is for making the setting in the right place. Added to that, it's just too easy for someone to adjust a setting directly, filing the new setting into the production class where it (a) overrides the System Default and (b) propagates when the class gets transferred.

John Murray · Jun 22, 2016

Out of interest, are all other settings of the production's configuration items identical between DEV and PROD? Or are you using System Defaults successfully to ensure that, say, hostname/port of outbound target system is different in DEV versus in PROD?

Many Ensemble sites that use our Deltanji source control tool to propagate code from DEV to PROD choose to exclude the production class itself from that workflow. Some maintain multiple variants of the class, e.g. one for DEV and another for PROD, versioning each variant only within its own environment, and using a diff tool such as Beyond Compare (which Deltanji integrates with) to propagate applicable production changes from DEV to PROD.

John Murray · Jun 21, 2016

Their client app is a GUI built in MSM-Workstation, correct? And presumably this app is talking to Caché using the InterSystems VisM.ocx, right?

Assuming VisM.ocx dispatches a double-precision value using the correct datatype, maybe MSM-Workstation's COM handling code doesn't deal with that datatype correctly.

Can they test VisM.ocx in a different client to see if it works there when retrieving their double-precision property?

John Murray · Jun 14, 2016

Here's a sneaky way to use a NEWable and SETtable system variable to cache your "safe" variable name in:

 new $etrap
 set $etrap=";"_..GetNewVarName() ; semicolon prefix makes the $ETRAP into a valid line of code (i.e. a comment)
 set @$extract($etrap,2,*)=""
 set @$extract($etrap,2,*)=$order(@@$extract($etrap,2,*))

You need more than one "safe" variable? Use subscripts of the one you've grabbed:

 set @$extract($etrap,2,*)@(1)="Some more info I need to store"
John Murray · Jun 14, 2016

I use Serenji. I can start interactive application debugging direct from the Terminal prompt. For a CSP or Zen based web app I can launch my pages in the browser and immediately start stepping through code, or running to soft breakpoints (no changes needed in my source). I can attach to background processes. I can set conditional breaks (e.g. break when variable ABC is set to value 123) or delayed breaks (e.g. stop the tenth time I get to this point). And with the Ensemble edition I can replay sessions command-by-command in a uniquely powerful way.

Disclosure: I created this tool in 1998 and continue to maintain and support it, so you should probably look to others for a more objective opinion of its value. Or try it free for 30 days.

John Murray · Jun 9, 2016

I think your code is vulnerable to a <MAXSTRING> error in the case of records with a large number of long values.

How about this instead, which might be a bit faster too?

set crc = 0
for i=1:1:in {
 set crc = $zcrc($char(i#256)_in(i), 7, crc)
}
return crc

Prefixing the input string to each $zcrc call with a character derived from the argument position number is intended to prevent us getting an unchanged CRC in the event that a substring has been removed from the beginning of one argument and appended to the previous argument (or removed from the end of one argument and prepended to the next argument)

The #256 is probably overkill because (a) you might be on a Unicode instance of Caché and (b) it might not even be possible to pass more than 255 arguments to the method (I haven't investigated).