Hi Community,

I'm pleased to announce DEVBOX, the code anywhere IDE for IRIS.
Please watch the video and let me know what you think. Would you use it?
All the best,
Sean.

Hi Community,

Here are two video demo's of Kozo Pages.

Hi Community,

I'm building a browser only code editor for IRIS. Here is a video demonstration. It's still very much "work in progress", more updates to come. I will also add it to ZPM soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am6QAvrPPPg

I want to embed the DTL editor in a third party web application.

If I open up the DTL editor then the full management portal banner is displayed.

http://localhost:52773/csp/healthshare/user/EnsPortal.DTLEditor.zen?DT=Foo.NewDTL1.dtl

If I open the same DTL in studio then I get just the editor, the banner is not displayed.

The DTLEditor page has the property studioMode that controls the banner display, but its not obvious how this is set.

Q. Is there a way to control that property without extending and shimming the page?

Q. Could there be a URL parameter or header that controls that value?

Q.

Hi Community,

Here is a link to a short video demonstration of a globals project called Cubes.

The source code for the project can be found here

Cubes on GitHub

Open up a random ObjectScript project (I think you need to be logged in first for this to work).

For example, the ZPM project

Then press "." (press full stop).

This will open the git repo inside an online instance of VS code.

Perhaps not that exciting for some, but I was impressed. Mainly because it's a good demo of editing ObjectScript in the cloud. As much as I like VS code locally, I still can't use it on many sites, and maybe not popular, but I still think IRIS + its own web IDE would be a killer combination.

In this article, we will explore the development of an IRIS client for consuming RESTful API services that have been developed to the OData API standard.

We will be exploring a number of built-in IRIS libraries for making HTTP requests, reading and writing to JSON payloads, and seeing how we can use them in combination to build a generic client adaptor for OData. We will also explore the new JSON adapter for deserializing JSON into persistent objects.

Working with RESTful APIs
REST is a set of engineering principles that were forged from the work on standardizing the world wide web.

Hi Community,

I'm looking for a new contract with immediate availability.

I have 20 years experience with InterSystems technologies in areas such as Healthcare integration and single page web development.

I can work almost anywhere in the UK as well as remote work from my office in Exeter.

If you know of any opportunities or could pass on my LinkedIn details to anyone that might be looking then it would be very much appreciated.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-connelly-94a6901/

Kind Regards,
Sean.

I've been looking at the idea of developing a Time Travel Debugger utility.

It would take a debug target and have a few options such as stack depth and disclude system code.

The debugger would either be started from an external tool, or triggered from a line of code inserted into a method that I want to record.

The debugger would execute the code from start to end and record the full stack on each step to the configured depth.

A visualisation tool would provide a set of controls to play the recording forwards and backwards and provide various ways to search and jump to points in the recording.

It was mentioned in an earlier version of the IRIS documentation that IRIS and Cache should not be installed on the same physical server (port clashes?).

I can't see this warning in the current version of the documentation.

Could someone clarify if this has been resolved in the latest release of IRIS?

Here's a fun test to see how well you know ObjectScript.

What will each of the following statements output?

Is there a responsive way to detect a source code change without using a source control hook?

Update

I have my own custom unit test tool which has lots of extra functions that I find useful such as Asserting HL7 Transformers and REST targets.

I have a studio hook that will send an event signal to my test runner that will automatically re-run a specific test class or test suite, for which I have a test runner viewing page that updates with the results.

There are some environments that already have a studio class registered and I don't want to shim something in-between the two.

I can directly order over a MultiDimensional property, e.g.

set key=$order(obj.prop(key))

However I have a generic method that has to use the $property method, if I know the keys then I can just fetch a value with...

set value=$property(obj,"prop","key")

But if I don't know the keys then I am not aware of a solution to do this, e.g.

set key=$order($property(obj,"prop",key))

will not work.

There must be an internal solution as a zw command on obj is able to list all of the keys. I'm wondering if there is a $zu function or other trick that can do this. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Sean.

I know we have nearly 5000 members on the DC site, but not even sure if this is a majority share or a minority share.

Anyone have a good guesstimate?

Sean.

If your looking to develop a Node.JS to Caché library then you might want to consider using a pure TCP connection with a custom message transport protocol. This bypasses the native Caché connector libraries that can get stale with a new release.

Node.JS is very good at non blocking code development, so building a performant solution isn't that complex. 

The idea behind this example is that we have a node HTTP server that maps HTTP requests to a Caché TCP connection.

I've collated a list of public Caché Projects that I've been able to find through GitHub topics and various other searches, let me know if I have missed any and I will add them to the list.

The full list is here...

https://github.com/SeanConnelly/Public-Cache-Projects/blob/master/README.md

Has anyone tried adding syntax highlighting to GitHub for Caché CLS files?

Looking at the list of supported languages and extensions...

https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/languages.yml

It looks like Mumps is supported, and there is also an existing language with a .cls extension, which would account for why I see some very odd highlighting going on with some of my code.

There is a page on contributing a new language here...

https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Looks like its possible to use extensions more than once for different

SOLVED

tl;dr how can you tell if a number is really a string

The original question has been updated/improved.

Equality comparisons on floating point numbers will produce different results...

"1.1"=1.1  //is true!

"0.1"=0.1  //is not true :(

This second comparison can be fixed with...

+"0.1"=+0.1 // is true!

The problem is, what if we don't realise that a value is a stringy number, or just overlook implementing this defensive check.

One solution would be to lint check %Float properties and return types that should originate from a number and not a string, as discussed here...

https://comm

If you want to dynamically serve images as a property of JSON then there is no perfect encoding solution. One method used frequently is to Base64 encode the image. Whilst there are some negatives to doing this, such as data inflation, there are some positives to working with Base64 images inside the browser.

Let's say you have an image placeholder on a web page...

And you fetch a JSON message from the Caché server containing the image as one of its properties...

tl;dr I have discovered that using $THIS in a very specific way will make persistent objects go stale.

I found that it only happens when using $get on an array that contains the OID reference of $THIS. I assume that this is an unwanted feature and have raised a WRC. The problem can be recreated following the steps below, I have also posted the workaround that I am currently testing and looks to be working fine.

1. Create a persistent class...

My oldest release is 2013 on this computer.

Does anyone know how far back $system.Version.GetMajor() goes.

Sean.

The Cogs.JsonClass library is now available in the Cogs project on GitHub.

https://github.com/SeanConnelly/Cogs

Please see the README and the /docs folder on how to use the class.

Overview

The Cogs.JsonClass class provides a one step serialisation and deserialisation to and from Caché registered and persistent classes. It is not dependent on any other code and should be compatible with older versions of Caché.

The unit tests have been included in the update, but until I release the dependent Touchstone unit test solution it won't be possible to run these tests.

Cogs Library

Over the next few months I will be releasing a number of open source libraries and tools to the Caché community.

Most of the code has evolved from previous production grade solutions over the years and I am collating it together under a single overarching library package that I am calling Cogs.

From a browser, an XMLHttpRequest to a CSP page on a different server will obviously hit the CORS security check.

To get around this I can set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on that particular CSP class.

However, setting any request headers on the XMLHttpRequest object will trigger a pre-flight OPTIONS request.

This OPTIONS request is not handled by the target CSP page and the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header is never set, triggering a CORS error.

I can see in the new REST class that it can get a handle on the OPTIONS request but standard CSP pages don't seem to get them.

Wanna Cry

Most of you should be aware that the Wanna Cry virus is massively infecting un-patched windows machines all around the world. It's particularly affecting the NHS, one of my main clients. 

Wanna Cry is one of a line of Viruses that exploit SMBv1 over ports 135 and 445.

A kill switch has been enabled, but this won't protect machines sitting behind http proxies, and there are already reports of new versions without a kill switch.

All windows machines should be isolated and updated a.s.a.p. 

If automatic updates is not on, a patch can be dowloaded from here...

https://technet.

I'm looking at adding multilingual support to a couple of open source projects I'm working on. The solutions are already developed in CSP so I am not looking for alternative approaches.

I'm wondering what would be the best approach for CSP and separate JavaScript files.

Initially I was wondering if I should bake the default system language text at compile time, or provide the end user with a language selection option at run time.

I came across $$$TEXT reading the docs...

https://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.

XDATA is used for a whole host of ISC libraries to store things like Zen pages, BPL logic and DTL transformations.

XDATA is the equivalent of XML config files of the JAVA world and JSON config files of the JavaScript / NPM world.

Whilst Atelier looks to shift source code to the disk, XDATA will remain a key component to source control our projects config / meta data.

I come across many developers who overlook XDATA, seeing it as an internal function of Cache and Ensemble and instead use globals to move meta data around, I've been there myself.

WebSockets look to be supported reasonably well in Cache. I have yet to use them in production so I am wondering how well it has worked for other developers.

In particular what happens when the browser does not support WebSockets, or when a firewall blocks the connection.

Have you had to write your own long polling fall-back?

I've read the documentation and found this interesting article...

https://community.intersystems.com/post/asynchronous-websockets-quick-tutorial

but no mention of long polling fall-backs that I can see.

Having tinkered around with sockjs and

If your handling XML then it can often be unformatted for human display.

Using a little bit of XSLT magic you can format the XML in just two lines of code...

On the back of my recent post on writing bug-less code I wanted to raise a few suggestions (to ISC) that would help prevent certain types of bugs at compile time. I've probably missed a few, but these are the main ones in my mind. Please contribute more suggestions.

Btw, these also serve as potential gotchas for new COS developers.

I except that introducing these types of changes can cause legacy code problems. Particularly where developers do some interesting overloading of method arguments.