Connectivity Options for Productions
InterSystems IRIS® enables you to define inbound and outbound connections to a wide variety of technologies. There are three general categories of options: adapters, specialized business host classes, and gateways.
If the built-in tools do not meet your needs, you can create your own components. Also see the InterSystems Technology Reference.
Adapter Library
InterSystems IRIS provides many adapters, and you can define your own. InterSystems IRIS provides adapters for the following scenarios:
Monitor an application by collecting data for a metric defined in Amazon CloudWatch. See Using the Amazon CloudWatch Adapter.
Send Amazon SNS messages.
See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.
Read and write data from a cloud storage provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure Blob Storage (Azure) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). When using an InterSystems product to access cloud storage, you have two options: use an interoperability production or call low-level APIs.
Receive email messages via the POP3 protocol and send email messages via the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
Read and write files on the local network. Open, create, delete, modify, and move files. The file content can be character or binary data.
Receive and send files between local and remote systems via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The file content can be characters or binary data. The adapters support FTP over TLS and SFTP.
InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect provide adapters for numerous healthcare data formats, listed elsewhere. InterSystems IRIS® data platform does not include these features.
Perform custom HTTP port listening, XML listening, or raw HTML handling. Supports the standard HTTP operations Post, Get, Put, and Delete. The adapters support proxy servers.
Send and receive JMS messages.
See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.
Send and receive Kafka messages.
See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.
Send requests to an LDAP server and receive responses.
See the EnsLib.LDAP.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entry in the Class Reference.
Send and receive files from Box, DropBox, and Kiteworks managed file services.
Send and receive messages in IBM WebSphere MQ (MQ Series) format. Message content can be a specific data type or a binary data stream. The adapter can simply send the message, or send it and then pull the corresponding response from the message queue.
Receive and send Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages. See Using MQTT Adapters in Productions.
Execute a shell command and communicate with it via pipes. The adapters can handle character data or a binary data stream.
See the EnsLib.Pipe.InboundAdapterOpens in a new tab and EnsLib.Pipe.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entries in the Class Reference.
Send and receive RabbitMQ messages.
See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.
Interface with the SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo).
See Using the SAP Java Connector in Productions for details.
Send requests to a Siebel server and receive responses.
See the EnsLib.Siebel.HTTPOutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entry in the Class Reference.
Listen for SOAP requests on a local TCP port or via a standard web server. Dispatches outbound requests by acting as a SOAP client to an external SOAP server. In this special case, adapters are not necessarily involved.
Execute SQL statements against a remote database via an ODBC-defined or JDBC-defined connection.
Manage an incoming or outgoing TCP connection. The adapters allows simultaneous handling of multiple connections. They also supports character and binary data streams, counted data blocks, and framed protocols.
Initiate and manage a Telnet connection.
See the EnsLib.Telnet.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entry in the Class Reference.
To use an adapter, you define a business host class that uses the adapter class. For a general description of this process, see Developing Productions. The topics in the previous list provide details that apply to the specific adapters.
As noted previously, you can also define your own adapters. For information, see Developing Productions.
Specialized Business Host Classes
For specific scenarios, InterSystems IRIS® provides specialized business service classes and business operation classes so that (usually) no coding is needed:
For practical reasons, the following sections might not cover all the specialized business host classes that InterSystems IRIS provides. To find all the specialized business host classes that specify an adapter, perform a search in an IDE, and look for Parameter ADAPTER within the EnsLib package.
Also, InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect provide specialized business hosts for numerous healthcare data formats, listed elsewhere. InterSystems IRIS® data platform does not include these features.
Business Host Classes That Use File Adapters
InterSystems IRIS provides business host classes that use the file adapters. The following table summarizes the supported content types and indicates where to find information.
| File Contents | See |
|---|---|
| EDIFACT documents | Routing EDIFACT Documents in Productions |
| X12 documents | Routing X12 Documents in Productions |
| XML documents | Routing XML Virtual Documents in Productions |
| Fixed-column or delimited text | Using the Record Mapper and Using the Complex Record Mapper |
| Any | Using the File Passthrough Service and Operation Classes |
Business Host Classes That Use FTP Adapters
InterSystems IRIS provides business host classes that use the FTP adapters. The following table summarizes the supported content types and indicates where to find information.
| File Contents | See |
|---|---|
| EDIFACT documents | Routing EDIFACT Documents in Productions |
| X12 documents | Routing X12 Documents in Productions |
| XML documents | Routing XML Virtual Documents in Productions |
| Fixed-column or delimited text | Using the Record Mapper and Using the Complex Record Mapper |
| Any | EnsLib.FTP.PassthroughServiceOpens in a new tab and EnsLib.FTP.PassthroughOperationOpens in a new tab in the Class Reference |
Business Host Classes That Use HTTP and SOAP Adapters
InterSystems IRIS provides business host classes that use the HTTP adapters. The following table summarizes the supported content types and indicates where to find information.
| File Contents | See |
|---|---|
| EDIFACT documents | Routing EDIFACT Documents in Productions |
| Any | Pass-through Service and Operation Walkthrough |
Business Host Classes That Use TCP Adapters
InterSystems IRIS provides business host classes that use TCP adapters. The following table summarizes the supported content types and indicates where to find information.
| File Contents | See |
|---|---|
| X12 documents | Routing X12 Documents in Productions |
| Any | EnsLib.TCP.PassthroughServiceOpens in a new tab and EnsLib.TCP.PassthroughOperationOpens in a new tab in the Class Reference |
Business Host Classes That Support REST
InterSystems IRIS provides business host classes that support REST. See Using REST Services and Operations in Productions.
Gateways and External Servers
InterSystems IRIS provides the following gateways and external servers:
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The SQL Gateway, which provides access from InterSystems IRIS to external databases via JDBC and ODBC. You can, for example, link to tables and views in external sources and access the data in them in the same way you access any local data. See Using the InterSystems SQL Gateway.
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An InterSystems External Server allows you to instantiate and manipulate objects written in an external language as if they were native objects within InterSystems IRIS. See Using InterSystems External Servers. In most cases, using the PEX framework to interact with an external language from a production is preferred over using the $system.external interface provided by the external server.
