_________ ___ ____  
  |__  /  _ \_ _|  _ \ 
    / /| |_) | || |_) |
   / /_|  __/| ||  __/ 
  /____|_|  |___|_|    

Starting in version 2021.1, InterSystems IRIS began shipping with a python runtime in the engine's kernel. However, there was no way to install packages from within the instance. The main draw of python is its enormous package ecosystem. With that in mind, I introduce my side project zpip, a pip wrapper that is callable from the iris terminal.

What is zpip?

Adding VSCode into your IRIS container

One of the easiest ways to setup repeatable development environments is to spin up containers for them. I find that when iterating quickly, it was very convenient to host a vscode instance within my development container. Thus, I have created a quick container script to add a browser-based vscode into an IRIS container. This should work for most 2021.1+ containers. My code repository can be found here

InterSystems IRIS container with vscode and pre-connected

Overview

Programmatic Production Access

To Programmatically Edit Productions (interfaces) you can use a combination of the interoperability apis and SQL queries.

Current Namespace

At a high level, it is important to know the namespace and production you are working in at the moment.

// Object script 
// The active namespace is stored in this variable
$$$NAMESPACE 
// Print namespace
Write $$$NAMESPACE

# Python
import iris
# The active namespace is returned from this method
iris.utils._OriginalNamespace()
# Print namespace
print(iris.utils._OriginalNamespace())
>>> DEMONSTRATION

Background

In InterSystems IRIS versions >=2021.2 we can use the accompanying irispython binary to directly write python code on top of our IRIS instances. This lets us use python packages, call methods, make SQL queries, and do nearly anything in Objectscript but pythonic.

For example, below I check if a namespace is present:

#!/usr/irissys/bin/irispython
import iris
# call arbitrary class methods
result = iris.cls('%SYS.Namespace').Exists('USER')
if result == 1:
    print(f"Namespace USER is present")

Updated Jan 19th, 2023.

Hi all,

I want to share a quick little method you can use to enable ssl with a self signed certificate on your local development instance of IRIS/HealthShare. This enables you to test https-specific features such as OAuth without a huge lift.

1. Install OpenSSL

Windows     : Download from https://www.openssl.org or other built OpenSSL Binary. 

Debian Linux: $ sudo apt-get -y install openssl

RHEL        : $ sudo yum install openssl

2. Create a self-signed certificate pair. In your terminal (powershell, bash, zsh, etc)