Table of Contents

1. Purpose of the article
2. What containers are and why they make sense with IRIS
    2.1 Containers and images in a nutshell
    2.2 Why containers are useful for developers
    2.3 Why IRIS works well with Docker
3. Prerequisites
4. Installing the InterSystems IRIS image
    4.1 Using Docker Hub
    4.2 Pulling the image
5. Running the InterSystems IRIS image
    5.1 Starting an IRIS container
    5.2 Checking container status
    5.3 Executing code in the container terminal
    5.4 Accessing the IRIS Management Portal
    5.5 Connecting the container to VS Code
    5.6 Stopping or removing the container
    5.7 Setting a specific password with a bind mount
    5.8 Using durable %SYS volumes
     5.8.1 What gets stored with durable %SYS
     5.8.2 How to enable durable %SYS
6. Using Docker Compose
    6.1 Docker Compose example
    6.2 Running Docker Compose
7. Using a Dockerfile to run custom source code
    7.1 Dockerfile example
    7.2 Docker Compose example
    7.3 Understanding layers, image tagging and build vs. run time
    7.4 Source code and init script
    7.5 Building the image with Dockerfile
    7.6 Running instructions in the containerized IRIS terminal
8. Conclusion and what’s next

Hi, Community!

Looking for an efficient way to allow providers to see whether prior authorization is required? See how the Coverage Requirements Discovery (CRD) module of the InterSystems Payer Services ePrior Authorization solution can help:

Coverage Requirements Discovery

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In this video, you will learn how CRD allows providers to connect an EHR to a payer system to evaluate coverage.

Watch the full playlist on YouTube(10m).

If you start with InterSystems ObjectScript, you will meet the XECUTE command.
And beginners may ask: Where and Why may I need to use this ?

The official documentation has a rich collection of code snippets. No practical case.
Just recently, I met a use case that I'd like to share with you.

The scenario:

When you build an IRIS container with Docker, then, in most cases,
you run the  initialization script  

iris session iris < iris.script 

When we need to integrate Caché/IRIS with other relational databases, one common question arises: “How do I set up the JDBC connection?”.
The official documentation doesn’t always provide a straightforward step-by-step guide, which can be frustrating, especially for beginners.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process of configuring a JDBC connection with MySQL, from downloading the connector to linking tables in Caché/IRIS.

Hi, Community!

Need to install a HealthShare solution module? Follow this simple step-by-step process to get started!

Deploying HealthShare Solution Modules with InterSystems Package Manager

I joined InterSystems less than a year ago. Diving into ObjectScript and IRIS was exciting, but also full of small surprises that tripped me up at the beginning. In this article I collect the most common mistakes I, and many new colleagues, make, explain why they happen, and show concrete examples and practical fixes. My goal is to help other new developers save time and avoid the same bumps in the road.

1. Getting lost among system classes and where to start

Hey folks! Having recently onboarded to InterSystems, I realized that despite having a totally free and awesome Community Edition, it's not super clear how to get it. I decided to write up a guide highlighting all the different ways you can access the Community Edition of InterSystems IRIS:

Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition as a Container

Working with a containerized instance of the Community Edition is the recommended approach for folks who are new to developing on InterSystems IRIS, and in my opinion it's the most straightforward. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition can be found on DockerHub; if you have an InterSystems SSO account, you can also find it in the InterSystems Container Registry.

In either case, you'll want to pull the image you want using the docker CLI:

docker pull intersystems/iris-community:latest-em
// or
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

Next, you'll need to start the container: In order to interact with IRIS from outside the container (for example, to use the management portal) you'll need to publish some ports. The following command will run the IRIS Community Edition container with the superserver and web server ports published; note that you can't have anything else running that depends on ports 1972 or 52773!

docker run --name iris -d --publish 1972:1972 --publish 52773:52773 intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

The August Article Bounty on the Global Masters article caught my attention, and one of the proposed topics sounded quite interesting in regard to its future use in my teaching. So, here's what I'd like to tell my students about tables in IRIS and how they correlate with the object model. 

First of all, InterSystems IRIS boasts a unified data model. This means that when you work with data, you are not locked into a single paradigm. The same data can be accessed and manipulated as a traditional SQL table, as a native object, or even as a multidimensional array (a global). It means that when you create an SQL table, IRIS automatically creates a corresponding object class. When you define an object class, IRIS automatically makes it available as an SQL table. The data itself is stored only once in IRIS's efficient multidimensional storage engine. The SQL engine and the object engine are simply different "lenses" to view and work with the same data.

First, let's look at the correlation between the relational model and the object model:

It's not always a 1:1 correlation, as you may have several tables represent one class, for example. But it's a general rule of thumb. 

Hi, Community!

Need a more efficient way to exchange health data? See how InterSystems Payer Services can help:

Automate Prior Authorization and Data Exchange with InterSystems Payer Services

Optimizing Performance of Apache Web Server and Web Gateway

By Patrick Jamieson, M.D., Product Technical Manager, InterSystems IRIS for Health

Are you familiar with SQL databases, but not familiar with IRIS?  Then read on...

About a year ago I joined InterSystems, and that is how IRIS got on my radar.  I've been using databases for over 40 years—much of that time for database vendors—and assumed IRIS would be largely the same as the other databases I knew.  However I was surprised to find that IRIS is in several ways quite unlike other databases, often much better.  With this, my first article in the Dev Community, I'll give a high-level overview of IRIS for people that are already familiar with the other databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, Snowflake, PostgeSQL, etc.   I hope I can make things clearer and simpler for you and save you some time getting started.

Hi Community,

Looking for a more personal approach to learning InterSystems products?

Try one of our live classroom courses! In just a few days, our experienced instructors will help you get up to speed, no matter your role.

Previously, we trained our model using machine learning. However, the sample data we utilized was generated directly from insert statements. 

Today, we will learn how to load this data straight from a file.

Updated 06/23/25

Hi Community,

Need to find the most relevant onboarding for your HealthShare Unified Care Record® team? Maximize your team's knowledge and success by diving into this curated list of offerings from InterSystems Learning Services—which includes online and in-person training for a variety of roles in your organization.

Onboarding Resources for Every Role

System Integrators

Hi, Community!

💹Need to unify your investment data? See how this cloud-based solution this   can help:

An Overview of Data Studio in Asset Management

The Good Old Days

The %Library.DynamicObject class has been in IRIS since before it became IRIS. If you have been using it since the Cache days, you may want to brush up on some of its changes.

In Cache 2018, the %Get method only had one argument. It was the key to retrieving from the JSON, meaning that if your JSON object called myObj, it would look like the following:

As we all know, InterSystems is a great company.

Their products can be just as useful as they are complex.

Yet, our pride sometimes prevents us from admitting that we might not understand some concepts or products that InterSystems offers for us.

Today we are beginning a series of articles explaining how some of the intricate InterSystems products work, obviously simply and clearly.

In this essay, I will clarify what Machine Learning is and how to take advantage of it.... because this time, you WILL KNOW for sure what I am talking about.

Is there a way to use a property of the type %Persistent class in a %ZEN.Component.page class?
Example:

// Data classClass PersistentClass Extends %Persistent
{
    Property Value As%String;
}

// Page classClass ClassName Extends%ZEN.Component.page
{
  Property TestProperty As PersistentClass; 
}

The problem is that when using it the described in the example.
The property can be set in a Method like this:

Hello All,

Is ther any way to convert RTF content into Text document/HTML docucment in Cache object scripts or by using %iKnow.Source.Converter.

Please advise.

Thanks,

Archunan K

How do you collect stack info when debugging non-interactive jobs?

I cobbled this together today from the docs, but maybe there's something pre-built? LOG^%ETN()?

set stack = ""for loop=0:1:$STACK(-1) { 
      set stack = stack _ "Context level:" _ loop _ " Context type: " _ $STACK(loop) _ $c(10,13) _
                          "  Current place: " _ $STACK(loop,"PLACE") _ $c(10,13) _
                          "  Current source: " _$STACK(loop,"MCODE") _ $c(10,13)
}

Log meth

For programmers new to ObjectScript, one question will inevitably arise: “What is the difference between methods and class methods?” A typical answer would be: “A class method applies to a class, but a method applies to an instance of that class.” While that answer is correct, it lacks important information on how these methods differ, and how they are used in ObjectScript. Many things could be written as either. For instance, suppose we had a class called “User.Person” with a property called “Name”. If we wanted to create a method to write that name, we could do either of the following:
 

Hi, Community!

🔎Find out how you can simplify your document storage and queries with InterSystems IRIS® Cloud Document!

⏯ Getting Started with InterSystems IRIS Cloud Document 

In this article I'll show you how to set up in your laptop, very quickly, a cluster of IRIS nodes in sharding. It's not the goal of this article neither to talk about sharding in detail nor define a deployment of a production ready architecture, but to show how to set up quickly, in your own machine, a cluster of IRIS instances configured as shard nodes, with which you'll able to play and test this functionality. If you're insterested in knowing more about sharding in IRIS, take a look at the documentation clicking here.  

First and foremost, I want to remark that IRIS sharding will allow us 2 things:

• Define, load and query shard tables, which data will be distributed transparently between the cluster's nodes
• Define  federated tables, which offer a global and composed view of data belonging to different tables that will be physically stored in different distributed nodes

So, as I said, we let for other article playing with shard or federated tables, and just focus now in the previous step, that is, setting up the cluster of shard nodes.

I was thinking about how to create a new parameter in a method, similar to Output or ByRef...

What documentation can I read to learn more about this?

I want to create a parameter customized.

Updated 2/27/25

Hi Community,

You can unlock the full potential of InterSystems IRIS—and help your team onboard—with the full range of InterSystems learning resources offered online and in person, for every role in your organization. Developers, system administrators, data analysts, and integrators can quickly get up to speed.

Onboarding Resources for Every Role

Developers

• Online Learning Program: Getting Started with InterSystems IRIS for Coders(21h)
• Classroom Training: Developing with InterSystems Objects and SQL(5 days)

System Administrators

• Learning Path: InterSystems IRIS Management Basics(10h)
• Classroom Training: Managing InterSystems Servers(5 days)

Data Analysts

• Video: Introduction to Analytics with InterSystems(6m)
• Learning Paths for every tool:
  • Analyzing Data with InterSystems IRIS BI
  • Delivering Data Visually with InterSystems Reports(1h 15m)
  • Build Data Models Using Adaptive Analytics(2h 15m)
• Classroom Training: Using InterSystems Embedded Analytics(5 days)

Integrators

• Learning Program: Getting Started with InterSystems IRIS for Health for Integrators(14h)
• Classroom Training: Developing System Integrations and Building and Managing HL7 Integrations (5 days each)

Implementers

• Learning Path: Deploying InterSystems IRIS in Containers and the Cloud(3h)
• Learning Program: Getting Started with InterSystems IRIS for Implementers(26h)

Project managers

• Watch product overview videos.
• Read success stories to get inspired—see how others are using InterSystems products!

Other Resources from Learning Services

• 💻 Online Learning: Register for free at learning.intersystems.com to access self-paced courses, videos, and exercises. You can also complete task-based learning paths or role-based programs to advance your career.
• 👩‍🏫 Classroom Training: Check the schedule of live, in-person or virtual classroom training, or request a private course for your team. Find details at classroom.intersystems.com.
• 📘 InterSystems IRIS documentation: Comprehensive reference materials, guides, and how-to articles. Explore the documentation.
• 📧 Support: For technical support, email support@intersystems.com.

Certification Opportunities

Once you and your team members have gained enough training and experience, get certified according to your role!

Learn from the Community

💬Engage in learning on the Developer Community: Chat with other developers, post questions, read articles, and stay updated with the latest announcements. See this post for tips on how to learn on the Developer Community.

With these learning resources, your team will be well equipped to maximize the capabilities of InterSystems IRIS, driving your organization’s growth and success. For additional assistance, post questions here or ask your dedicated Sales Engineer.

Hi, Community!

Are you working with clinical data in a research setting? See how InterSystems OMOP streamlines data integration and analysis.

Using InterSystems OMOP to Transform FHIR Data

Hi all!  

In this article I would like to review those VS Code extensions which I use myself to work with InterSystems and which make my work much more convenient. I am sure this article will be useful for those who are just starting their journey to learn InterSystems technologies. However, I also hope that this article could be useful for experienced developers with many years of experience and open up new possibilities for them when using VS Code for development.

Hello All,

 I'm new to InterSystems, just wanted to check if we can configure the Visual Studio code to use it as Studio for Intersystems development. I tried following the instructions in few posts but nothing worked. Please  guide me to setup this

Hi Community,

Are you looking for resources to help your team onboard? Use these guides to get started!

I am a volunteer at a nonprofit that is attempting to connect to a product that uses InterSystems Cache (Clinisys LIMS). I have not used this database before, but I have used many others (MS-SQL, Oracle, etc.). I am hoping IRIS is compatible enough with Cache for this project. 

I downloaded IRIS. I learned about Terminal [IRIS]. Using it I was able to create a new table, insert data, and retrieve it. I also used the Management Portal to query the new table. It also returned the data.