#Testing

Yes, that's right, a Cache 2017.1 question.  Let's all take a trip in the Wayback Machine.

Hello!!!

Data migration often sounds like a simple "move data from A to B task" until you actually do it. In reality, it is a complex process that blends planning, validation, testing, and technical precision.

Over several projects where I handled data migration into a HIS which runs on IRIS (TrakCare), I realized that success comes from a mix of discipline and automation.

Here are a few points which I want to highlight.

1. Start with a Defined Data Format.

Target Practice for IrisClusters with KWOK

KWOK, Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet, is a lightweight tool that simulates nodes and pods—without running real workloads—so you can quickly test and scale IrisCluster behavior, scheduling, and zone assignment.  For those of you wondering what value is in this without the IRIS workload, you will quickly realize it when you play with your Desk Toys awaiting nodes and pods to come up or get the bill for provisioning expensive disk behind the pvc's for no other reason than just to validate your topology.

If you have already built unit tests using the %UnitTest framework, or are thinking about doing so, please take a look at InterSystems Testing Manager.

Without leaving VS Code you can now browse your unit tests, run or debug them, and view previous run results.

InterSystems IRIS interoperability production development involves using or writing various types of components. They include services (which handle incoming data), processes (which deal with the data flow and logic), and operations (which manage outgoing data or requests). Messages flowing through those components constantly require being adapted to consuming applications. Therefore,Data transformations are by far the most common component in interoperability productions.

Hi, Community!

Looking for ways to improve your application testing? See how to build requirements such as performance and scalability into your development workflow:

Testing Non-functional Requirements in Applications

If you like what you see please support this in the Developer Tools 2025 contest. Voting closes at midnight EDT on Sunday 3rd.

Overview I'm excited to announce the release of testcontainers-iris-node, a Node.js library that makes it easy to spin up temporary InterSystems IRIS containers for integration and E2E testing. This project is a natural addition to the existing family of Testcontainers adapters for IRIS, including testcontainers-iris-python and testcontainers-iris-java.

Well... It's time for testing. We know that often, it's already over. So, what now? Can I improve the quality of my development?

The answer is: YES. Yes, you can. The Toolqa tool aims to do just that. It's a facilitator. What's its goal?

To ensure that APIs meet pre-established business requirements, while also protecting against <sarcasm>  future failed attempts </sarcasm>  to destroy your application, website, app, or anything else that uses your API.

Now you might be wondering, how does this happen? Where's the magic?

The new version of InterSystems Testing Manager which I released last week brings @Timothy Leavitt's cool 
Test Coverage Tool to VS Code, and is my entry for the 2025 Developer Tools contest.

Here's a teaser screenshot showing how the unit tests of the IPM project don't yet cover a feature that apparently allows an IPM repository to override its sort order.

Now that we have a good understanding of Python and its features, let's explore how we can leverage Python within IRIS.

• Introduction to Python in IRIS
• Language Tag
  • How to use it?
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (pypi modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (custom modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion

Are you curious about how to run Python scripts directly in your InterSystems IRIS or Caché terminal? 🤔 Good news it's easy! 😆 IRIS supports Embedded Python, allowing you to use Python interactively within its terminal environment. 

How to access the Python Shell?

To launch the Python shell from the IRIS terminal, simply run the following command:

do##class(%SYS.Python).Shell()

This opens an interactive Python shell inside the IRIS terminal. From here, you can write and run Python code just as you would in a normal Python environment.

Exiting the Shell:

>>> quit()

Users of the %UnitTest framework can now get test coverage information inside VS Code by combining the latest release (v2.0.0) of the InterSystems Testing Manager extension with @Timothy Leavitt's impressive Test Coverage Tool.

Above you can see the Test Coverage pane, which I have moved to the secondary sidebar on the right so it can more easily be explored in conjunction with the Test Explorer on the left.

Hey Community, 

Last week, the InterSystems team held our monthly Developer Meetup in a new venue for the first time ever! In the AWS Boston office location in the Seaport, over 71 attendees showed up to chat, network, and listen to talks from two amazing speakers. The event was a huge success; we had a packed house, tons of engagement and questions, and attendees lining up to chat with our speakers afterwards! 

Jayesh presents on Testing Frameworks for Agentic Systems to a full house

At hackathons that InterSystems participated and I supported, many students were asking how all their teammates could use the same IRIS database that they spun up in a container. I suggested using ngrok to expose their localhost IRIS and realized we don't have documentation on that. Hence, I thought this would be great to let more people knwo about this powerful technique for enhancing collaboration during development and testing.

Step-by-Step Guide to Exposing InterSystems IRIS with ngrok

One of the pain points for maintaining HL7 interfaces is the need to run a reliable regression test upon deployment to new environments and after upgrades. The %UnitTest class allows unit tests to be created and packaged alongside interface code. Test data can also be maintained within the unit test class, allowing for quick and easily repeatable smoke-testing and regression testing.

##Resources:

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Unit Testing with IPM

Hi folks!

I'm building a very simple REST API.

But before testing it via a Web Server what I want to make sure that REST API methods work in principle.

Is it an easy way to "fake" the web-server request and get a result e.g. of the method with signature like that?

ClassMethod GetAllRecords(pRequest As %CSP.Request, pResponse As %CSP.Response) As %Status

e.g. calling it in Terminal?

Hello all! We fully tested our system http://DataAI.link on InterSystems Cache database and on old IRIS. We cannot find a free download of IRIS for developer as it was before. We are looking for help from the community to test our system from the http://DataAI.link by register a user with connection to your testing IRIS database and play with our reports, analytics, AI. Another way is to trust us with connection string to your testing IRIS database and we will test our system and report results to you. Thanks for your help! Irina Yaroshevskaya PhD, Yanbor LLC http://DataAI.link

Hi! I've extended my demo repository, andreas5588/demo-dbs-iris, to make it easy to test the FOREIGN SERVER and FOREIGN TABLE features in IRIS.

To achieve this, I created a namespace called FEDERATION. The idea is as follows:

1. Set up JDBC connections for each namespace.
2. Create a FOREIGN SERVER within the FEDERATION namespace for each connection.
3. Define a FOREIGN TABLE a least for one table based on each foreign server.

The Script:  demo-dbs-iris/src/sql/02_create_foreign_server.sql

Hi everyone,

I’m currently experimenting with the SQL Gateway Connection, CREATE FOREIGN SERVER, and the THROUGH command (IRIS Documentation). To speed up my tests, I’ve combined several DemoDataSets in a Docker container and would like to automate the creation of SQL Gateway Connections using code. 

(By the way, if you’re interested, the Docker container is available here: Demo DBs IRIS.)

Hi Community,
In this article, I will introduce my application iris-HL7v2Gen .

I was working on a DTL but kept getting ERROR #5002... MAXSTRING errors. The problem was that most of the DTL GUI action steps only support the string data type when working with the segments. A %String has a limit of 3,641,144 characters and my OBX5.1 was 5,242,952 characters long as the example provided. Of course PACS admin stated ultra high quality up to and including 4K resolution files were needed, so we could not get the vendor to compress or reformat these files to compressed jpg or something similar.

We've recently made available a new version of InterSystems IRIS in the Vector Search Early Access Program, featuring a new Approximate Nearest Neighbor index based upon the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) indexing algorithm. This addition allows for highly efficient, approximate nearest-neighbor searches over large vector datasets, dramatically improving query performance and scalability.

There are many applications for working with HL7 V2 messages, but the tools for working with XML in IRIS Management Portal and Cache Studio are limited. While plenty of external utilities and IDEs work with XML messages and even C-CDA documents, there is a compelling case for being able to test directly against the IRIS C-CDA framework. 

Testing within the IRIS environment provides the necessary context: 

Hi everyone,

In this article, I’m excited to introduce CodeInspector, a tool designed to simplify code validation by applying custom rules tailored to your development requirements. Whether you're managing a large codebase or working in an agile environment, CodeInspector helps ensure code quality by offering flexibility and adaptability to specific project needs.

Motivation

Hello,

First of all thanks for your help, and thank you for your time.

We have the following task:

To generate by hand the Ens.Request with the properties and inner Data Schemes which represent this XML, in HealthShare, by hand; the XML is this one:

Trying to test a router that takes an XML input and performs a transform on it.First attempt I tried to test the transform using the XML Document Viewer via the Ensemble -> Interoperate -> XML Document Viewer menu. The transform itself is working however I can not get the output to save to a file. I've made sure permissions are set correctly on the file. It simply doesn't output anything and I'm at a loss as to why.As another method I also tried testing via Ensemble -> Test -> Business Hosts. Putting the file path/name as the source does not send any data. Again, I've made sure read

We have a custom business service that is triggered by a scheduled task. The service queries a table, iterates over the result set and sends a message on to a business process for each result. Happy path functionality is all fine.

However, when there is an error detected in the business service code, neither throwing an exception nor returning an error %Status behaves as we'd expect.

I'm trying to learn M programing for an Epic db class prerequisite. They said to download the IRIS Studio software to do the testing. I'm having a very difficult time finding information the language. I'm trying to run some examples that Epic has provided (like in below) but the compiler complains that it isn't valid. Of course, it doesn't tell you why it isn't valid.

r !,"Enter the hour: ",hr  
 r !,"Enter the minute: ",min 
 r !,"Enter the second: ",sec 
 s Mtime=$$ConvertToMTime(hr,min,sec)
 w !,"Equivalent M time: ",Mtime  
 q
ConvertToMTime(h,m,s)
 q (h*3600)+(m*60)+(s)

I get these errors: