For my intern project, I am building a Flask REST API backend. My goal is to host it on InterSystems IRIS using the WSGI interface. This is a relatively new approach and is currently only being used in a handful of projects such as AskMe. To help others get started, I decided to write this article to simplify the process.

Creating a Basic Flask App

First, let’s create a minimal Flask application. Here is the code:

My IRIS Haiku:

Store all things with care

Interop'rability

IRIS unites us

My intention is to show how simple it is to generate a lookup table taking into account the information received in our HL7 messaging. The HL7 message lookup table provided by IRIS is certainly sufficient for most of the searches we want to perform, but we always have that special field in our HIS, LIS, RIS, etc. that we'd like to search by. But that's in a segment outside of that lookup table. That field forces us to generate a specific search using the expanded search criteria. We'll likely have many messages, and we'll also have to filter by date and time so we don't timeout.