Learning LLM Magic

The world of Generative AI has been pretty inescapable for a while, commercial models running on paid Cloud instances are everywhere.  With your data stored securely on-prem in IRIS, it might seem daunting to start getting the benefit of experimentation with Large Language Models without having to navigate a minefield of Governance and rapidly evolving API documentation.   If only there was a way to bring an LLM to IRIS, preferably in a very small code footprint.

The Lo-Code Challenge

Imagine the scene.  You are working happily at Widgets Direct, the internet's premier retailer of Widgets and Widget Accessories.   Your boss has some devastating news, some customers might not be fully happy with their widgets, and we need a helpdesk application to track these complaints.   To makes things interesting, he wants this with a very small code footprint and challenges you to deliver an application in less than 150 lines of code using InterSystems IRIS.  Is this even possible?

Hi Dev Community

I thought i would share a little method I knocked together to traverse and compare 2 JSON objects for basic equivilance.   I'm currently working on some data migration, and wanted a basic sanity check to validate that the JSON output is basically equivliant between the old and new, excluding a few things like timestamps.  

It's a basic little recurvsive method, that will bubble up any differences over a nested structure.   It's very low tech, as that's all I need it to do, but I thought it might be useful for others?

a.k.a..  "The World of Widgets Returns!" or "Paternity leave damages Instructional Series momentum"

In our last lesson, we combined 2 separate classes to appear as the same property.  We now have the ability to Update our Widget catalog, but what if we want to Create a Widget?  Thankfully, we've already done 90% of what we need, just by implementing Edits

As we mentioned when creating the REST Services for PUT and POST, the only real difference between creating and updating a record is whether we are passing in an existing ID or creating a %New

In our last lesson, we added some formatting and validation to our Edit Widget form.  So, now we are ready to add the ability to add new Widgets to our application.  However, the great Widget Wars have come to an abrupt end, as Widget Direct has purchased its biggest competitor, WorldWideWidgets.  In order to maintain some continuity, we need to display their catalog on our new application.

So, we have good news and bad news.

In our last lesson, we added a form to Edit our existing Widgets, and save them back to the server.  However, our Form was not well structured and our Save button had no intelligence, and was not fully visible.  So today, we will apply some Material components and Angular style to make the form more useful

Let's open EditWidget.csp, and make some changes.  First, we want to change the component from an md-card to an md-dialog.

In our last lesson, we implemented a new REST Service to allow us to perform CRU operations on Widgets, and refactored our Controllers to allow the page setup to be decouple from the content.

When we created our Widget Services, we did not implement a Deletion operation, which the HTTP Delete verb provides.  As this is a base table for other parts of the Widgets Direct empire, we don't want to be able to do a hard Delete of the WIdget values, as this could cause issues with our ordering and billing modules.

In our last lesson, we implemented a linkage to our WidgetAccessory class, and debugged some errors we encountered along the way.  We now have our data being returned by REST, but what if we want to update or add new data to our application?  

So far we have only used HTTP GET commands with our REST Services, we now have to implement PUT (which roughly corresponds to an Update) and a POST (which roughly corresponds to a Create.  Author's note: there is a lot of writing online about why this statement isn't entirely correct, I'm not going to go into the detail here).

or "Bonus Breakage"

In our last lesson, we added a relationship between 2 persistent classes.  We are clearly going to need to start creating REST Services to expose CRUD operations for each of these classes, but before we do that, we should really finish defining our linkages.  We added code to our Widget toJSON to spool off related Accessory data, so we should really do the reciprocal and allow Accessories to return all Widgets that are compatible.

The code we can use is essentially the same as we used on the Widget side.

or "Things are going to break"

We left our application over the weekend, secure in the knowledge that it was returning data from our primary persistent class, User.Widget.  However, Widgets Direct are the premier supplier of both Widgets AND Widget Accessories, so we should really start working on adding these Accessories to our application. 

We should do some housekeeping first though.  Our Page Controlller code is currently sitting in the widgetmaster.js file.

or "Didn't you say you would cover Persistent Objects in Part 5, Chris?"

Yes, that was the plan.  This is a pretty important topic, so it get's its own Article

Up until now, we've display widget JSON that has been created by a basic loop.  Clearly this isn't of much value.  Now we have our stack connected together, and we can see that the data is flowing to the Welcome page, it's time to complete the stack and start feeding our service from "real" data.

Let's start with our (very basic) Persistent class for Widgets.  We have 4 properties to hold Name, Description, Price and current Quantity.

At the end of our last lesson, we ended with our page displaying a nice (but garish) Angular Material Toolbar, and our Widget data displaying in a list of Material cards.  Our page feels a bit static, and we already know that the large number of Widgets that we will be dealing with will not be especially usable on a static list.  What can we do to help?

A filtering function would be very helpful, so let's add a text input to the top of the page. We will bind this to a variable in the $scope - widgetFilterText so that Angular has access to the value we type in.

So, one day you're working away at WidgetsDirect, the leading supplier of widget and widget accessories, when your boss asks you to develop the new customer facing portal to allow the client base to access the next generation of Widgets..... and he wants you to use Angular 1.x to read into the department's Caché server.   

There's only one problem:  You've never used Angular, and don't know how to make it talk to Caché.

This guide is going to walk through the process of setting up a full Angular stack which communicates with a Caché backend using JSON over

We finished our last lesson with our Widgets Direct page iterating over a list of widgets, displaying an ID and a Name value.  While we have been able to achieve this with only a small amount of coding, the page itself is not the most visually appealing place to be.  The AngularJS framework is providing a powerful Model-View-Controller framework for our structure and logic, but it does not implement anything that will provide a nice UI experience.  For that we need to implement a UI toolkit.

I've been creating some posts with embedded images, and some of the images seem to stop resolving after a period of time.  I've resaved them, and that has helped temporarily, but I just checked and one of the images is now not resolving again.  Is there a limit to the number of images on a post, or should I be using a specific filename pattern?

THanks

Chris

We finished our last lesson with our Widgets Direct page receiving a Welcome message as a property of a JSON object, which was unpacked and displayed on the page. However, we are on Lesson 3, and we still haven't had any talk of displaying widgets yet.  

Let's change that.  Widgets Direct are a leader in widget and widget accessories, so we clearly have numerous items to display.   To transfer this, we will need to declare and return our first array.  Let's go back to our REST.Dispatch class, and add this data to our Service.

or "So you just got yelled at by your boss, for sending him an unformatted Hello World webpage"

Our previous lesson ended with us serving a Message value obtained from a Caché REST service to the client, using Angular as a runtime.  While there is a lot of moving parts involved in this process, the page is not especially exciting at the moment.  Before we can start adding new features, we should take a step back and review our tools.

This tutorial is using the JSON functionality built into 2016.2+ versions of Caché.  This functionality is partially available in 2016.

So, one day you're working away at WidgetsDirect, the leading supplier of widget and widget accessories, when your boss asks you to develop the new customer facing portal to allow the client base to access the next generation of Widgets..... and he wants you to use Angular 1.x to read into the department's Caché server.   

There's only one problem:  You've never used Angular, and don't know how to make it talk to Caché.

This guide is going to walk through the process of setting up a full Angular stack which communicates with a Caché backend using JSON over

I'm currently re-engineering an application from CSP pages directly accessing COS Methods, to an Angular/Material front end accessing a REST DAL.  Both the Angular front end and REST services are hosted from the same Caché instance and the same namespace, but the REST services have their own CSP application, with all calls being routed through a Dispatch class.  

I've come across an architecture issue recently, and am trying to assess the options I have.  At present, we encode a call to a class which takes in an OID and returns the Stream to the browser.

I'm working on a REST service which will include a binary stream as a request property. I'm currently encoding the stream as BASE64 and passing it as a string value, but I was wondering if there is anything in the Caché JSON support that may be a better fit for encoding this data? Thanks Chris

Hi

I have been working on changing a web application from using %FileBinaryStream to storing and serving the file content from a %Stream.GlobalBinary property, stored in a new database.  I have managed to migrate the data across, and have also been able to redirect the stream so that it is being served through the web link.  However, the previous method set attributes on the File stream to have the stream be rendered as the original file type through MIME, using this code

do stream.SetAttribute("ContentDisposition","inline; filename="_filecvt)

This method is not supported by %Stream.

I've been building up a REST services API, consisting of a dozen or so classes referenced from a Dispatch class, which has route mappings for the first piece of the URI.  I'd like to have the Dispatch class be able to output all of the available Services, with some documentation.  Is there something like a %Library resource that I could use to pull this information from each of the classes?

Thanks

Chris

Hi

I have been experimenting with the creation of a set of REST services for an app.  The basic GET operation is set to create a %ZEN.proxyObject instance, and then set an instance of a Persistant class as a property, which gives me all of the values I want to return.  However, it also gives me some values that I don't want to return over REST (because they are both private, and large registered objects which will bog down performance)

How do I remove these values from the ZENproxyObject?

Hi



I'm starting to play around with dynamically creating tabs and panes from query data, and was trying to do the following, with nested tabs.

Tab Group

High level tabs

Sub Tab Group

Sub tabs from the High level tabs.

So I have built up my page with a placeholder top level tab group, then creating and added child tabs to this, then from this level, I have created a new Tab Group programatically, and programmatically added tabs to this new group.  However, all I am getting is the top level of tabs, with all of the leaf data concatenated under it.