If you deal with multiple instances of Caché / Ensemble / HealthShare and sometimes have to work at the Terminal command prompt, did you know that you can easily add extra information to that prompt which may help prevent you running a command on the wrong instance?

The DC homepage has a Top Stories panel.

What makes a story appear here?

When I click the "View All" link (highlighted above) I get the page at https://community.intersystems.com/top-stories

This one seems to reload periodically, each time displaying more and more posts. Will it ever stop? Or maybe it'll try and load every post there's ever been.

Perhaps because of the periodic reloading, the Comments, Views and Rating counts never seem to appear alongside the entries:

Now that 2017.1 has been released, any indication when we can look forward to the next Field Test starting?

Update on 27-Apr-2017: the 2017.2 FT for Caché and Ensemble is now available via this page.

Update on 02-May-2017: announcement posted here.

During startup a Caché/Ensemble/HealthShare instance must consult a parameter file to get some information it needs at the early stages of startup. By default it uses the file called cache.cpf, but by adding an extra argument to the ccontrol start command you can make it use an alternative file.

Before this Developer Community existed a Google Group named intersystems-public-cache was an active forum for people working with Caché and related products.

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:

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.

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"?

Below is a clip from the https://community.intersystems.com/homepage/default/no_answer page:

The entry I've focused on reports having 3 answers. So why is it listed?

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.

I suggest you put the "Back to question page" and its preceding checkmark (which denotes whether or not my answer was accepted) onto the "Answers" summary page in place of the "Answer:" hyperlink that doesn't look like a hyperlink.

Suppose I find a post that seems really useful, and that I expect to want to return to in the future. I click on the star to favorite it (giving the author some kudos). But later there's a lot of commenting on it that I don't care about. Can I keep it as a favorite but unsubscribe from updates? Or should I resort to browser bookmarking?

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.

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.

Your session key is available as a property named Key of your %CSP.

As well as participating in DC I continue to monitor the Google Group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/intersystems-public-cache

Since yesterday the Google Group has started receiving postings from a user called intersystems.dc. These postings look like they're trying to replicate DC postings, though images don't appear. Nor are there any links leading across to DC, which is where the follow-up comments and answers are likely to appear.

Is this feed something that the DC software is now doing? Or is it some independent person's initiative?

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:

Maybe the contents are context-sensitive elsewhere too and I just haven't noticed yet.

Early on in my use of DC I think I marked a couple of things as favorites. On the right-hand side of the DC listings I have this:

The first entry links to a post by Bill McCormick. The second links to the Field Tests group.

Is there a way for me to remove these entries? Or are they a remnant of some DC feature that has been superseded?

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.

To use the "Favorites" section you need to tag your favorite pages. Suppose I want to add the production monitor page as a favorite. Here's how:

1. Navigate the menu to find the link for the page you want.

2.

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:

Clicking on a match doesn't take me direct to the page (or am I missing a trick here?). Instead it gives me this:

And now a click takes me to the page I want.

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.

Per the information at http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY… I am trying to use a call to $ZF("GETFILE") to obtain information about an OpenVMS file. But I get an <ILLEGAL VALUE> error.

For example:

w $zf("GETFILE",filename,"UIC")

reports:

My filename variable contains the full path and name of a file that I own. I hold the %All role in Cache.

This is 2012.1.5 on OpenVMS/IA64  V8.4

Any ideas what's going wrong?

I just received three subscription digest emails that seem to have come from the past. For example, one included this fragment:

But when I follow the link from the email the article date is much older:

Did the DC software have a glitch?

The 2017.1 FT keys expired on December 31st 2016. Can we have a new set?

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. ​

The Ens.Config.Production class has a property called SubProductions

Are sub-productions a work-in-progress within Ensemble? I'm not aware of any documentation or UI related to them.

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".

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.

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. "

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.

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 chown

Afterwards non-root users couldn't obtain a terminal session using the csession command.