Article John Murray · Mar 17, 2017 1m read Portal tip: System Mode If you work with Portal on multiple instances of Caché, Ensemble or HealthShare you might find it useful to set the System Mode of the various instances, so as to give yourself a visual reminder of the role of the one you're currently working on.For instance: #Caché #Ensemble #HealthShare #Tips & Tricks 6 1 0 738
Article John Murray · Mar 16, 2017 1m read Portal tip: Your system at a glance In case you've never used the "About" link at the top of Management Portal, here's a screenshot of the kind of information it shows. I've highlighted the link and some of the information I find it handy to get from here. #Caché #Ensemble #HealthShare #Tips & Tricks 1 1 0 255
Article John Murray · Mar 16, 2017 1m read Suggested change to "Developer Community" tag From time to time someone adds the "Developer Community" tag to a post that's actually about something else. I wonder if by renaming the tag to "Developer Community Feedback" this wouldn't happen so much. After all, the group is called "Developer Community Feedback". If folk feel the proposed new name for the tag is too long, how about "DC Feedback"? #DC Feedback 0 0 0 116
Article John Murray · Mar 3, 2017 1m read Atelier - the first three months Almost exactly three months ago Atelier 1.0 was released. If you are an early adopter and have any feedback to share, here's a thread we could use.For instance, during the Field Test I posted this article about the two explorers, Atelier Explorer (AE) and Server Explorer (SE). Presumably more people are now using Atelier, so I'd be interested to hear how it's going. 2 4 0 645
Article John Murray · Mar 2, 2017 1m read Suggestion for improvement to Answers tab of My Account The top of my Answers tab looks like this:To get to the question, first I have to click on the "Answer:" text (which only gets the appearance of a hyperlink when I mouse over it).That click takes me here:I now need to click on "Back to question page" in order to get where I want to be. #DC Feedback 1 2 0 204
Article John Murray · Mar 2, 2017 1m read Trusting the code you import As more people join Developer Community, and with increasing efforts to promote code sharing, I'd like to draw fresh attention to this post I wrote a year ago. It spotlights a feature within the class compiler which is both useful and dangerous. When importing code (e.g. from an XML export of classes received from someone), it's worth considering the risks.Even if that post doesn't seem relevant to you at the moment you may wish to note it for the future. A handy way of doing this is to click the star icon at the end of it. #Code Snippet #Deployment #Object Data Model #Tips & Tricks #Caché 2 1 0 277
Article John Murray · Feb 14, 2017 1m read Can you keep a secret? If you are developing applications that use CSP or Zen, or potentially any of the other InterSystems web-related stuff that's built on top of CSP, then it's important to know how to keep one particular secret.A central part of the CSP security architecture is a server-side session key. "Server-side" because its value should never be revealed to the client that is issuing the web requests. If it is revealed, a malicious client might be able to use it to bypass your security and make your server do things you don't want it to. #Security #Frontend #CSP #ZEN #Caché 7 1 0 654
Article John Murray · Feb 14, 2017 1m read Portal tip: The inconspicuous Menu button Amongst the large fonts and chunky icons of Portal's pages, the Menu button in the top left corner is easily overlooked:When clicked, it often produces the following menu:When I remember it's there, I find the "View Console Log" option particularly handy.I wrote "often" above because I've also noticed that the Menu contents change when I'm on a page within the Ensemble section of Portal: #Caché #Ensemble #HealthShare #Tips & Tricks 4 1 0 523
Article John Murray · Feb 14, 2017 1m read Portal tip: Feel at home on the Home page Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you. #Caché #Ensemble #HealthShare #Tips & Tricks 3 0 0 401
Article John Murray · Feb 14, 2017 1m read Portal tip: Use the search box User interfaces such as Portal often give us multiple ways of doing a task. Sometimes we stick with habits and don't realize that another way might save us time. Here's one that I learned by watching someone else using Portal. Use the Search box to get quickly to a page that may otherwise be several layers deep in the Portal hierarchy. For example, suppose I want to check the status of the ECP networking: #Management Portal #Tips & Tricks #Ensemble 2 3 0 292
Article John Murray · Feb 1, 2017 1m read Gotcha when roundtripping classes in UDL format using %Compiler.UDL.TextServices The class %Compiler.UDL.TextServices arrived in 2015.1, bringing us methods for exporting a class in UDL format (i.e. looking just like we're used to seeing it in Studio), and importing a UDL format definition back into a namespace. Some source control tools including our Deltanji are now able to use UDL format, resulting in diffs that are easier to understand. #Caché #Change Management #Compatibility #Compiler #Tools #Ensemble #HealthShare 1 1 0 308
Article John Murray · Dec 15, 2016 1m read Version history for the production class Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. #Change Management #Tools #HealthShare #System Administration #Ensemble 3 0 0 375
Article John Murray · Nov 8, 2016 1m read Interpreting icons in Atelier Explorer view While testing Atelier 1.0.255 I noticed that the namespace subtree of my Atelier project used different icon shading for the top-level Classes folder compared with the top-level Routines one:Drilling down into parts of the Wasabi package helped me work out the significance of white-filled icons versus brown-filled ones:A package is white if there are no classes in it, but only subpackages. 1 8 0 485
Article John Murray · Nov 8, 2016 1m read Home page summary doesn't display emoji My recent Ensemble posting here contains a wink emoji in its first sentence, but when rendered on the DC homepage summary list it shows as the text "wink". #DC Feedback 0 4 0 213
Article John Murray · Nov 8, 2016 1m read Vote here - Should Portal's schema editors respect source control? For those who don't have a chance to vote elsewhere today, or for those who want to vote more than once , here's a poll for Ensemble users. #Change Management #Ensemble 6 3 0 359
Article John Murray · Nov 7, 2016 1m read At last! - Ability to Create Namespaces that are not Enabled for Ensemble - Coming in 2017.1 I'm pleased to see this in the documentation of the just-published 2017.1 Field Test of Ensemble:"In certain circumstances, it is useful to create namespaces that are not enabled for Ensemble. In this release you can do this by clearing the Make this an Ensemble namespace checkbox when creating a new namespace. " #Ensemble #Release #System Administration 4 1 0 566
Article John Murray · Oct 26, 2016 1m read Faulty heading on Member page [Fixed] I used the Members option from the Community button to look up Evgeny's profile. Above the tabs ("View", "Mentions", "Posts (53)" etc) his name was displayed (correct).Then I clicked on the "Posts (53)" tab. It showed his posts, but displayed my name above the tabs. #DC Feedback 2 2 0 176
Article John Murray · Sep 14, 2016 1m read Minor typo in Atelier 1.0.240 "Loading lists of CSP resoorces from XXX" 1 1 0 232
Article John Murray · Sep 2, 2016 1m read chown may clear the setuid and setgid bits on Caché executables I was recently troubleshooting a problem on a Linux (RHEL) instance of 2016.1 at a site. For policy reasons their sysadmins wanted to update the Caché installation so it used network accounts for its cacheusr and iscagent users and groups instead of the locally-created ones that had been set up during original install of Caché.To do this they ran various commands including chownAfterwards non-root users couldn't obtain a terminal session using the csession command. Instead they receive this message:cache: Permission denied #Caché #Tips & Tricks 3 2 0 590
Article John Murray · May 27, 2016 1m read Improving the Atelier Add-Ins and Templates dialogs Please make these dialogs easier to use, for example by treating a double-click on a list item as a signal to select the item and effectively click the "Next" or "Finish" button. Using Tools\Add-Ins as my example, on the first page: 1 3 0 459