#ObjectScript

Hi folks!
Our community is growing rapidly, and the knowledge base is incredibly vast. Whether you're a newbie, confused, and unsure where to start, or a seasoned IRIS veteran who occasionally forgets a few basic rules (it's normal and happens to everyone!), you'll find this brief overview of IRIS basics and all its wonders useful.
Here I'd like to begin a series of articles dedicated to this topic.
There will be eight main topics in total:

1. InterSystems ObjectScript
2. Build with REST APIs
3. Managing Data Models
4. Explore Integrated ML
5. Interoperability & Integrations
6. Introduction to IRIS HealthShare products
7. Analytics & Business Intelligence
8. Deployment & DevOps

Each of them will consist of four parts: Courses, Community articles, Documentation, Applications

This particular part will cover InterSystems ObjectScript. For your convenience, all categories will be hidden under a spoiler.
 

On save the ClassMethod:

ClassMethod create() [ Language = python ] {

 print("python") 

}

it has received the error : Compilation started on 06/03/2026 02:15:21 with qualifiers 'cuk /multicompile=0'

 ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1078:17' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(9119826733444):0'.

 ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1078:17' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(9119826733444):0'.  

with the compileFlags "cuk" the return is:

ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1160:34' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(6933525859080):0'.

Hi folks,

One of the things I've been thinking about recently: how strong AI is changing my work as an ObjectScript developer right now! Yeah, yeah, I know I'm not a very fast, it should have happened 2-3 years ago... But it's only now that I've realized that I am not writing the code all my workday like before.

Abstract

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.

This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.

Back when I was a Developer Support Engineer in the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC), I would occasionally receive cases involving large message backlogs in a production. The customer would discover that a subset of queued messages were no longer useful and would ask a question similar to the following:

Is there an established best practice for mass-aborting messages in a specific component's queue that match a particular set of criteria?

For those who learned Caché ObjectScript from scratch: what kind of personal or practice projects did you build to get comfortable with the language? I come from a C# background and I'm looking for project ideas that are small enough to be feasible but meaningful enough to actually teach the core COS concepts.

IRIS 2026.1 provided Partitioned Tables as a new option for large data sets
It's a great improvement as it offers standardization of this feature.

Though:
It was possible also before, matching requirements and leaving room for creativity.
less elegant with a bit more coding and fewer automatisms.

Many organizations that operate systems built on legacy technology stacks are facing significant support and maintenance complexities. They are eager to modernize, but the transition is usually prohibitively complex and expensive. These challenges apply to virtually any legacy tech, while InterSystems-based systems have their own unique nuances.

Key modernization challenges include:

• Refactoring massive amounts of code, including identifying and removing obsolete "dead code."
• Managing complex business logic accumulated organically over decades.

For those of you that weren't at READY last week, you may have missed the exciting announcement that the Early Access Program for AI Hub is officially open. It was announced during an amazing demo from @Benjamin De Boe and @Jeff Fried, I recommend catching up with this demo when the recording is released!  I had the opportunity to play with AI Hub in advance, and thought I might share an introduction with the community.

Was wondering if anyone had a Dynamic way to see if a Global is still being used by a Class File. 

We have been monitoring our Global Size recently, and I am trying to find problematic Class files that are not being cleaned up or used appropriately. I have come across some globals that do not seem to have a Class attached to them anymore, and instead of deleting globals 1 by 1, I was looking for a way that we could dynamically do this since the globals have data that is stale in them.

Thanks

Scott

Abstract

Solar irradiance forecasting is critical for grid stability in photovoltaic (PV) power plants. This article replicates and extends the methodology of Lara-Benítez et al. (2023) "Short-term solar irradiance forecasting in streaming with deep learning" replacing the original offline simulation with a fully operational streaming pipeline built on InterSystems IRIS. We leverage IRIS Interoperability Productions as the streaming backbone, Embedded Python to run MLP, LSTM, and CNN deep learning models, and IntegratedML as an AutoML baseline.

As an experiment in agentic coding in ObjectScript I'm using VS Code to try and create an implementation of an SFTP server.

SFTP is built on top of SSH, so the first phase involves implementing an SSH server. While working on the KEX part of that the agent (using GPT-5.3-Codex) reported:

1. IRIS has what we already need for signing and hashing: RSASHASign, RSASHAVerify, RSAGetLastError, SHAHash, SHA1Hash, SHA3Hash.
2. It does not list a Diffie-Hellman key exchange or modular exponentiation API in %SYSTEM.Encryption.

It then offered these options:

1. Keep using IRIS APIs for cert/key/sign/hash.

. . . you are not alone. 

Help is available.

This took me a while to figure out, and I assume there may be others struggling too. I made my way through all the Entra stuff to set up a client credentials workflow to send email through a Microsoft 365 account. I was able to successfully retrieve my token, but I couldn't ever get it to authenticate with the SMTP server using the %Net.SMTP class. There were two parts to fixing this.

First, the authenticator's access token needs to be more than JUST the access token. It has to be formatted as:

set smtp.authenticator.AccessToken = "user="_emailaddress_$C(1)_"auth=Bearer "_token_$C(1,1)

Hey Community, 

Yeah, I know we have a lot of tips & tricks articles - we even have a special tag for it, right? But I can not share my own collection. In this collection, you can find snippets for beginners, as well as some everyday ObjectScript constructions. In fact, it's also a way to learn something new about my favorite programming language. So, if you guys have anything to add, you are welcome!

Hi Community,

Take a look at these new videos in online learning, and get familiar with new features and interfaces in the latest release of InterSystems® products. All videos are also available in the Learning Services YouTube channel.

Plus, check out a video for new ObjectScript developers, and a guide for HealthShare® users upgrading their deployments.

• Goal: Learn about enhancements to the interoperability UI in version 2026.1 of InterSystems products.

Most IRIS developers use $LISTBUILD every day — often without even noticing it.

It is not just a convenient function for building lists. It is also the default internal format used to store row data, global values, and many intermediate structures inside the database engine.

Despite this, the actual binary representation of $LISTBUILD values is rarely discussed. Most developers rely on its behavior, but never look at how the data is really stored.

This article focuses strictly on the binary layout of $LISTBUILD values, based on direct inspection via zzdump.

I need a %SYS.Python object that will be accessible from different processes. The goal is to avoid reinitializing the Python object whenever it is called. Ways that I checked and decided that it is NOT what I want:

• %-variables (process variables). Reusing only in the same process
• Save-and-restore via globals. Restoring means heavy initialization, which I want to avoid

Next, my ideas (none of them look like a silver bullet):

• Using Interoperability Production.

What is a Microservice?

A microservice is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous services. Each component is developed around a specific business capability, can be deployed independently, and is typically managed by a miniature, specialized, self-governing team. (Source: https://microservices.io/)

Has anyone done this successfully?  Customer wants to receive HL7 data over https using OAUTH 2.0 client credentials.  I am assuming a custom Operation will be needed?  I tried using CoPilot for assistance but was unsuccessful.  I am not great with Object script :( 

We didn't start with a big AI strategy.

We had a legacy InterSystems Caché 2018 application, a lot of old business logic, and a practical need: build a new UI and improve code that had been running for years. At first, I thought an AI coding agent would help only with a small part of the work. Maybe some boilerplate, some REST work around the system, and a bit of help reading old ObjectScript.

In practice, it became much more than that.

This past weekend we ran into something odd. When we failed over our mirror from 2022.1.3 to 2025.1.3 the one of the Business Rules that was on what became the Primary (2025.1.3), had a rule within it that was removed back in January. When the Failover occurred, we had to scramble to backup, disable, and remove the Rule that shouldn't have been there. 

Both the Data and Code live within the same IRIS.dat that is the main MIRROR database for that Namespace. 

If this happened to one Class file, could it happen to others we do not know about?