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Article
· Sep 11 9m read
Dates with InterSystems

Do not let the title of this article confuse you; we are not planning to take the InterSystems staff out to a fine Italian restaurant. Instead, this article will cover the principles of working with date and time data types in IRIS. When we use these data types, we should be aware of three different conversion issues:

  1. Converting between internal and ODBC formats.
  2. Converting between local time, UTC, and Posix time.
  3. Converting to and from various date display formats.

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Article
· Jul 16 6m read
Method or Class Method?

For programmers new to ObjectScript, one question will inevitably arise: “What is the difference between methods and class methods?” A typical answer would be: “A class method applies to a class, but a method applies to an instance of that class.” While that answer is correct, it lacks important information on how these methods di

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I came up with a challenge for myself to come up with a way to make a variable watch itself for a certain value and do something when it hits that value without having to check it every time something touches it. Basically, a way to say "if at any point during the execution of this code, if x = 0 (or whatever the condition is) do this thing." The class I ended up with watches a %Status:

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The ideal number of table permissions to assign for your users is zero. Permissions should be granted upon sign-in based on the application used for access. For web applications, we have a simple way of doing this by appointing application roles, matching roles, and required resources in the System Management Portal.

ODBC and JDBC connections present a different problem, however, especially when third-party applications are involved. As providers of an ERP system, our customers often wish to be able to employ various software packages to integrate with or report on their data. Many of these programs are capable of running any kind of query. Yet, letting them do that can be devastating to a customer’s data.

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Here in %SYS, we have already examined users, resources, and roles. Now that we know how to set all of that up, we should give it a purpose. Next we will talk about applications! As you may expect, we will see various identical class methods defined here that we have seen in the previous classes. However, some of them will have some tiny yet significant differences.

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We are looking at what we need to do to migrate from our current usage of Zen reports to InterSystems Reports. One of the hurdles for us is figuring out ways to interact with InterSystems reports programmatically from ObjectScript routines. There is a Java API for it, but it is possible to generate a report from InterSystems reports to a stream object in ObjectScript without diving into Java by using a %Net.HttpRequest. Here is a code example, followed by an explanation:

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Is there a way to add specific table permissions to a security role programmatically? I'm working on scripting some of the initial setup work when we sell certain add-ons to our software, and I see how I can assign resources to a role and give it a description, but I don't see how I tell it that this role gives the user, for example, SELECT privileges only on the invoices table, or SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

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In Cache 2018, we were using a macro in a query that looked like this:

select $$GetExtraSQL^GetExtra('B',bddtl.odnumb,bddtl.odsnum,bddtl.oddsc1) as "Description", * from sqluser.bddtl

We could save that query as a view, and there was no problem with it.

In IRIS, if we put that query into SQL in the management portal, it still works, but if we save that query as a view, when we try to run a query on that view, we get a big error message:

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Has anyone had any success reading barcodes from PDFs or images in a Cache/IRIS application? I've been looking at some possible solutions for this, including the open source ZXing libraries. I know we have the ability to create them in Zen and Intersystems Reports, but as far as I know, there's nothing built in to actually read data from a barcode. If anyone has suggestions on how to go about this, I'd love to hear them.

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Is there a way for us to restrict user's ODBC permissions based on what program they're running on a client?

For example, we have some older Windows apps (.exe) that are a regular part of our software package which require the user to be able to select, insert, update, and delete. Some of our users are also using other third-party apps to connect (mostly reporting tools) but we only want them to be able to select unless we've approved the exe. Is there a way to do that?

These are not applications that were developed using CacheDirect.

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