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Colin Brough · Jan 29

With help from WRC, looks like this is something of our own doing - we were using sub-transforms in ways that caused us problems. Our sub-transforms above were outputting whole new XML documents, when at the very least they should have been taking existing partially produced XML from the top-level transform and using that existing document to output. We "solved" the node ordering issue by moving everything into a single transform, so there was no mismatch between top level and sub-transforms.

Colin Brough · Nov 20, 2024

We've got the same issue, but with an incoming HL7 feed with embedded, encoded characters - would be nice to be able to detect what's coming in, but I take it from this discussion that's not (reliably) possible. Don't really want to scan the whole text of every incoming message to heuristically look for possible encodings. Upstream say/think they are sending UTF-8, but we seem to be getting Window-1252, for the characters we've seen in the (limited) testing. Who knows what will come through the feed once it goes live!

Colin Brough · Sep 27, 2024

Auto-adjust / design question 4: we'd find this useful, especially if it handles bulk renames - a bunch of classes implementing a data type, all being moved in one go from one place in the class hierarchy to another and all being consistently renamed.

So files X/Y/A.cls, X/Y/B.cls, X/Y/C.cls, and containing classes X.Y.A, X.Y.B, and X.Y.C being moved to Q/P/A.cls and Q.P.A etc. Especially if Properties defined in X.Y.A as "Property pp As X.Y.B" becomes "Property pp As Q.P.B" when renamed.

Colin Brough · Sep 18, 2024

Closing off an old question for completeness, we never did get Zen working. In the end we used Apache FOP directly:

  • HL7 -> XML as described in the original question
  • call Apache FOP using $ZF(-100,  $$$fopbat, "-xml", XMLfilename, "-xsl", StyleSheetFilename, "-pdf", PDFfilename)

This puts the output PDF onto the filesystem from where, in our solution, it is later picked up for onward transmission to a downstream system.

Colin Brough · Sep 18, 2024

For the sake of closing off this old question, and to answer my own question, in light of more experience and some testing...

  • side effects of the transformation could, in theory, change the behaviour - but it'd have to be a transformation that had side-effects (eg kept some kind of state across executions, whether in globals or on the filesystem or in some other way)
  • performance could be affected, since transformation is called twice rather than once, but in most cases the difference is likely to be negligible.
Colin Brough · Sep 2, 2024

Business Operation is one generated by SOAP Wizard. It is being fed by a custom Business Process that runs in response to a scheduled task - the BP queries a database table and extracts a set of documents to send. At certain points in the day we want to query the table like this:

      SELECT * from TABLE

while at other points in the day we want to query the table like this:

      SELECT TOP NN * from TABLE

Then the documents selected by the query are sent, in turn, to the Business Operation for onward transmission.

Colin Brough · Aug 16, 2024

We have a situation that looks suspiciously similar:

  • job that runs an external program via $ZF(-100,...) to perform a task from a business process runs perfectly when the Pool Size = 1
  • not all of the external tasks complete successfully when Pool Size > 1

More detail:

  • Production takes incoming stream of HL7 ORU_R01 messages, and for each one produces a PDF
  • this is done by converting each HL7 to an XML representation, then calling Apache FOP (the one pre-installed in Ensemble) with a stylesheet and the XML to build the PDF. A business process takes care of this step.
  • with Pool Size = 1 runs correctly
  • with Pool Size = 2 all the XML files are generated (via a call to a class method) but only a small subset of the PDF files are generated - maybe 4 out of 20?
  • no error messages that we've been able to find yet

Here's an illustrative screenshot - yellow are first HL7->XML->PDF, green are second HL7->XML->PDF. Yellow produces a PDF, green doesn't. As far as we can tell the FOP commands should be independent (no shared files - unless stylesheets can't be opened by multiple processes simultaneously?)



Only thing we've seen in documentation that gives us pause is the line: "On a Windows system you should never omit both the /ASYNC and /STDIN flags." (from $ZF(-100) | InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2024.2) - but when only one copy is running it appears to be fine with "" as the flags argument.

Is this a $ZF/Ensemble issue, or is it something about FOP specifically?