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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:

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitor an application by collecting data for a metric defined in Amazon CloudWatch. See Using the Amazon CloudWatch Adapter.

Amazon SNS
Cloud storage

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.

See Accessing Cloud Storage.

Email

Receive email messages via the POP3 protocol and send email messages via the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

See Using Email Adapters in Productions.

File

Read and write files on the local network. Open, create, delete, modify, and move files. The file content can be character or binary data.

See Using File Adapters in Productions.

Also see Business Host Classes That Use File Adapters.

FTP

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.

See Using FTP Adapters in Productions.

Also see Business Host Classes That Use FTP Adapters.

Healthcare data

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.

HTTP

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.

See Using HTTP Adapters in Productions.

Also see Business Host Classes That Use HTTP Adapters.

JMS (Java Message Service)
Kafka

Send and receive Kafka messages.

See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.

LDAP

Send requests to an LDAP server and receive responses.

See the EnsLib.LDAP.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entry in the Class Reference.

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Send and receive files from Box, DropBox, and Kiteworks managed file services.

MQSeries

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.

See Using IBM WebSphere MQ Adapters in Productions.

MQTT

Receive and send Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages. See Using MQTT Adapters in Productions.

Pipe

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.

RabbitMQ

Send and receive RabbitMQ messages.

See Using External Messaging Platforms from Within Productions.

SAP

Interface with the SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo).

See Using the SAP Java Connector in Productions for details.

Siebel

Send requests to a Siebel server and receive responses.

See the EnsLib.Siebel.HTTPOutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab entry in the Class Reference.

SOAP

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.

See Creating Web Services and Web Clients in Productions.

SQL

Execute SQL statements against a remote database via an ODBC-defined or JDBC-defined connection.

See Using SQL Adapters in Productions.

TCP

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.

See Using TCP Adapters in Productions.

Also see Business Host Classes That Use TCP Adapters.

Telnet

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

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