Intersystems caché - programmatically create new c

Question

Is it possible to write ObjectScript method, which will create new class in namespace and compile it? I mean programmatically create new class and store it. If so, can I edit this class using ObjectScript later(and recompile)?

Reason: I have class structure defined in string variable and I need to add new class to namespace according this string.

Answer 1

Yes, it is. You likely want to make use of %Dictionary.ClassDefinition and the related %Dictionary.*Definition classes (especially %Dictionary.PropertyDefinition, %Dictionary.MethodDefinition and %Dictionary.IndexDefinition) to create and/or modify your class. Provided your string contains some reasonable representation of the data, you should be able to create the class this way.

The actual class documentation is available at http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20141/csp/documatic/%25CSP.Documatic.cls?CLASSNAME=%25Dictionary.ClassDefinition

You can then compile the class by calling $system.OBJ.Compile("YourPackage.YourClass","ck").

(Note: If your string contains the exported XML definition of the class, you could also write the XML representation to a stream and then call $system.OBJ.LoadStream() to import the XML definition. I would only recommend this if you have an exported class definition to start with.)

Answer 2

Nothing is impossible. Everything in Caché can be created programmatically. And, Classes is not a execution. There are at least two ways to do it:

• simple SQL Query CREATE TABLE, will create a class.
• and as you already mentioned ObjectScript Code, which can do this.

All of definition of any classes defined in other classes. Which you can find in package %Dictionary.
The class itself defined in %Dictionary.ClassDefinition. Which have some properties, for defining any parts of classes. So, this is a simple code which create some class, with one property.

set clsDef=##class(%Dictionary.ClassDefinition).%New()
set clsDef.Name="package.classname"
set clsDef.Super="%Persistent"

set propDef=##class(%Dictionary.PropertyDefinition).%New()
set propDef.Name="SomeProperty"
set propDef.Type="%String"

do clsDef.Properties.Insert(propDef)

do clsDef.%Save()

And in latest versions, there is one more way for create/change class. If you have text of class as you can see it in Studio. Then, you can load it in Caché, with class %Compiler.UDL.TextServices