The current maintenance kit is Caché 2008.2.2. This document is only part of the available maintenance kit documentation. The full set of documents is available in the \Docs subdirectory of your Caché installation as follows:

• Late-breaking information about the release: \relnotes\cache\readme.1st
• Release notes for Caché 2008.2.2: \relnotes\cache\relnotes.htm
• Release notes for the previous maintenance kits since 2008.2: \relnotes\cache\prenotes.htm (this document)

This document is a historical archive of changes in Caché since the original 2008.2 release, but prior to the current maintenance kit. Changes unique to the current maintenance kit are described in relnotes.htm.

This document includes the following sections:

• General Announcements
• InterSystems News, Alerts, and Advisories
• Online Documentation
• Change Reports for Previous Maintenance Kits

InterSystems advises all users to recompile their Application classes as part of the upgrade process so as to take advantage of all the performance improvements as well as other changes that may affect them in this release.

Anyone upgrading from a Caché release at or before 5.0 will need a new license key.

From time to time, InterSystems publishes items of immediate importance to users of our software. These include alerts, mission critical issues, important updates, fixes, and release announcements.

The most current list can be obtained from the InterSystems Web site.

Users should check this list periodically to obtain the latest information on issues that may have an effect on the operation of their site.

As a convenience to our users, InterSystems provides online access to documentation for recent product versions at the InterSystems Web site. From the home page’s Products menu, choose Caché. On the Caché page, choose Product Specifications & Documentation, then Documentation. Then select the specific version and type of documentation you are interested in.

Version 2008.2.1 of Caché included the following changes:

When CSP caches a page returned from Caché it is usually the case that the page is cached with the session ID (either as a CSPSESSIONID cookie or CSPCHD form variable) of the user that first requested the page. On subsequent retrievals of this page from the cache for other users, CSP must replace all instances of the old session ID with the ID of the current user accessing the page.

This change corrects a problem where the replacements were done even in places where they should not be, such as embedded Javascript in the page.

In the 2008.2 releases of Caché, the optimizations for (a+1) and (a-1) do not work on 32-bit Power PC systems when A is an expression of the IEEE double-precision binary floating-point type. The compiler special cases increment-by-1 and decrement-by-1 and evaluates these operations using special routines written in assembly language. The 32-bit Power PC version of these assembly language routines do not properly implement increment/decrement of $DOUBLE values.

An argumentless ZLOAD with an immediate end of file leaves the partition empty. In this situation an access violation could occur on a subsequent DO command. This is now fixed.

This change corrects a problem where $LISTSAME could give erroneous results for lists involving strings and negative numbers.

On the Task Manager wizard, new prompts have been added for Start Date and End Date for Daily definition, similar to that of Monthly and Monthly by Day.

The default for the Start Date is today.

On the Task Manager wizard, new prompts have been added for Start Date and End Date for Weekly definition, similar to that of Monthly and Monthly by Day.

The default for the Start Date is today.

The ECP server shutdown has been changed to cleanup any queued pending pre-fetch requests.

If not cleared properly, in very, very rare conditions, the ECP server may receive a msg while the same session's write daemon is shutting down, and leave the background pre-fetcher in a confused state.

To provide its guarantees, the ECP server depends on the durability of its activities. Durability tracking was dependent on the journal file number, which is not updated and tracked in parallel with the journal offset. This change modifies the durability logic not to depend on the journal file number.

This change corrects an error in exchanging strings between the client and server. When receiving strings from the server, the C++ binding now converts them to Unicode unless the client has the same locale. When sending strings to the server, the binding now converts strings to Unicode and then to the server locale, unless the client and the server have the same locale.

This change converts strings back to numbers when they are returned from methods. Previously, this was not done in all circumstances.

The class compiler had a dependency on '~' collating in a certain order which was not true on a specific Czech locale. This caused an error like:

ERROR #5355: Method generator dependency unresolved: ,,,,,

ERROR #5030: An error occurred while compiling class User.Test

when compiling a class.

This has been changed so that the code now uses an integer value which will always collate the same way regardless of locale.

When the class compiler processes something like ##class(Name).Method(), it normalizes this classname based on the import list or the origin of this method, that is, the class where this method was defined.

However, generator methods are treated as if they were implemented in each subclass. So this changes the compiler to normalize names in this case relative to the current class rather than the class where this generator was initially defined.

The class keywords, Dynamic and SqlRoutinePrefix, are no longer used, but this change still allows them to be imported in XML files.

When sending the cached output in a redirection, an error could occur if the redirection was executed in a context that made bindserver variables unavailable. This has been fixed.

A problem has been corrected where an include file was stored in a precompiled state but the include code contained a #execute MPP directive that needed to be executed for each routine where the include file was used.

If a class defined a property of type %Stream.GlobalCharacter or %Stream.GlobalBinary and then called the <prop>GetObject method to return the stream OID, the OID was not correctly formed. This caused the delete of a stream to silently fail in those cases where it used the OID from <prop>GetObject to call %Delete on the stream class.

This has been corrected.

This change makes sure that the element prefix is always defined and thus fixes an error in the Canonicalize method of %XML.Writer that lost the element prefix when there were multiply-defined prefixes.

This change corrects a signing error with elements that have a prefix different from that of the default namespace defined in that element. The symptom of the error was extra xmlns="..." in child elements.

This changes fixes a problem with a <SUBSCRIPT> error when calling Security.Applications.Modify(). The error occurred when the list of target roles for the application definitions exceeded 255 characters in length.

A problem has been corrected where "FOR SOME %ELEMENT" on a MV multivalue field might encounter a <LIST> error at execution time.

This change corrects the behavior of package mapping. For example, assume

• namespaces exist called N1 and N2;
• there is a package PK in namespace N1, and it has been mapped to N2 via package mapping;
• a package FK exists in namespace N2.

If there is a foreign key in N2.FK.Class that references N2.PK.Class, the application must make sure package FK is also mapped to namespace N1. Failure to do so will cause any SQL INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE or Object saves/delete on class table PK.Class in namespace N1 to fail with a <NOROUTINE> error.

A problem has been corrected where some literal values used in a SELECT query via xDBC may not report the correct datatype value if literal values appear in both the SELECT clause and the FROM clause of the query (such as in a sub-query in the FROM clause of the main query).

This change optimizes the processing of queries involving arrays of elements. The processing for the elements was moved to be inline rather than processed in routine calls.

This change corrects the handling of a condition of the form:

(F=? OR F=? OR ...)

to avoid causing a <FRAMESTACK> error when it contains hundreds of terms.

This change corrects an error in the handling of queries in the style generated by MS/Access. Such queries contained conditions in the WHERE clause that occurred in an order different from the field order of the row. Under some circumstances, this caused incorrect code to be generated for the query.

This change corrects an error that can occur with FROM clauses and subqueries. Under some circumstances, queries involving nested IN queries within WHERE clauses in conjunction with HAVING clauses could disable important optimizations.

Studio was calculating version based on MAJORVERSION and MINORVERSION. This caused a problem in connecting to 2008.2.1.

The calculation has been corrected so that it now satisfies the requirement that the client should have a version not lower than the server.

This change fixes the methods AsAString() and AsXString() used by Studio to determine the length of a string to be converted. Prior to this, under some circumstances, calculation could result in an access violation.

Beginning with 2008.1, Studio printing added an extra blank page at the end of a print job.

This is now fixed.

This change re-enables support for float-point that was disabled accidentally for 2K databases. The symptom of the problem was that errors occurred when attempting to KILL a floating-point node in a 2K database.

This change adds two missing cp1250 table descriptors that prevented 8-bit locales based on this character set (for example, csw8, plw8, huw8) to be installed.

This change avoids a potential <WIDE CHAR> error during the NLS phase of Caché upgrades running on 8-bit locales that use non-Latin1 character sets such as CP1251-based Russian (ruw8).

This change allows digits in the middle characters of locale names (for instance, "yt8w"). These were prohibited by ^NLS, but could be produced by cnls.exe in older versions and therefore are valid.

This change corrects an internal stack management problem when loading a routine larger than 65311 bytes. Before the change this situation could lead to the stack overwriting other memory structures which could, in turn, lead to memory exceptions and process dumps.

This issue occurs on any system where a process loads a routine larger than 65311 bytes more than 255 times.

The 'margin' parameter of the terminal USE command (e.g. USE 0:(270) ) was handling values >255 differently on OpenVMS Alpha and Itanium. The documentation says "Values from 1 to 255 set the right margin for output; any other value disables the right margin".

However, on OpenVMS Alpha, Caché handled values up to 511. On OpenVMS Itanium, Caché internally truncated the value to one byte, essentially acting as a #256 on values between 255 and 512. This change makes OpenVMS Itanium act like OpenVMS Alpha.

A callin program that tries to start an instance before the instance is fully initialized locks the instance and prevents startup while the callin program exists.

This change corrects that situation.

This change fixed a database security hole that allowed a user who did not have access to a global to successfully execute a $ORDER on such a global.

This change fixes a possible lock table inconsistency between client and server when an ECP server shuts down and is restarted. In this situation, some "cancelled" locks might stay in the client's lock table even though they did not exist in the ECP server.

This problem exists on big endian platforms.

This change corrects a problem where a missing "^" before a reference to rINDEX caused Caché to rebuild the routine index incorrectly with a bad length.

This change corrects a situation where the default answer of "NO" might be interpreted as "YES" in %ER.

This change allows Backup.General.ExternalThaw() to complete in an OpenVMS cluster environment. Prior to this, it would hang.

This change corrects an error where extra columns may be displayed in Zen table panes under certain circumstances. This can happen when (1) dataSource is set to "columns", (2) there are more columns in the source data than there are columns defined by the tablePane, and (3) table uses "snapshot" mode.

If the current day is the 31st of the month, and you select a date in a month with less than 30 days, then the calendar will display the wrong month.

This is now corrected.

This corrects an error where client is using daylight savings time, close to the end of the day the date used by calendar may be off by one day.