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.

In our previous article, we explored how to send emails through Microsoft 365 using the Graph API. Since then, an anonymous client reached out to me about setting up some other methods of notifications through that API.

One of the most common kinds of integration we are asked to do is emailing. One of the most typical email services our customers use is Microsoft’s Office 365. After setting up the right configuration on the Microsoft side, we can email from IRIS with two HTTP requests.

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.

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.

Welcome back to %SYS! If you read the first article in this series, you must have already seen how to manage your users through the Security.Users class programmatically. Today, we will move on to Resources! Many of the classes in this package use a very similar set of methods.

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: