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Introduction to XEP for .NET

See the Table of Contents for a detailed listing of the subjects covered in this document.

InterSystems IRIS® provides lightweight .NET SDKs for easy database access via relational tables (ADO.NET and SQL), objects, and multidimensional storage. See Using .NET with InterSystems Software for relational table access with ADO.NET, and Using the Native SDK for .NET for multidimensional storage access. This book describes how to use XEP for high speed object persistence and retrieval.

XEP is optimized for transaction processing applications that require extremely high speed data persistence and retrieval. It provides a high-performance Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) persistence framework for .NET object hierarchies. XEP projects the data in .NET objects as persistent events (database objects mirroring the data structures in .NET objects) in the InterSystems IRIS database.

The following topics are discussed in this document:

Also see Setup and Configuration later in this section.

Related Documents

The following documents also contain related material:

Setup and Configuration

The XEP client assemblies can be copied to your local instance of InterSystems IRIS as part of the installation process:

  • When installing InterSystems IRIS, select the Setup Type: Development option.

  • If InterSystems IRIS has been installed with security option 2, open the Management Portal and go to System Administration > Security > Services, select %Service_CallIn, and make sure the Service Enabled box is checked.

    If you installed InterSystems IRIS with security option 1 (minimal) it should already be checked.

You can run your XEP client applications either on the same machine as the instance of InterSystems IRIS, or on a remote machine connected to an InterSystems IRIS server over TCP/IP. The remote machine does not require a local instance of InterSystems IRIS, but must have a copy of the XEP client assemblies on a path accessible to the application, and must be running a supported version of .NET or the .NET Framework.

In order to run XEP applications:

  • The User namespace must exist on the machine running InterSystems IRIS, and must be writable.

  • The PATH environment variable on the machine running InterSystems IRIS must include <install-dir>/bin (which contains the main InterSystems IRIS executables). If the PATH includes multiple instances of <install-dir>/bin (for example, if you have installed more than one instance of InterSystems IRIS) only the first one will be used, and any others will be ignored.

XEP Client Assemblies

Your XEP application must include references to the XEP client assemblies. The assemblies come in multiple versions, compiled under multiple supported versions of .NET. Use the file or files corresponding to the .NET version used to compile your project:

  • InterSystems.Data.IRISClient.dll — is always required, and is available for each supported version of .NET and the .NET Framework.

  • InterSystems.Data.XEP.dll — is required only for applications using a version of the .NET Framework. .NET 5.0 and later do not use this file.

In your instance of InterSystems IRIS, versions of these files are located in appropriately named subdirectories of <install-dir>/dev/dotnet/bin. For example, the version for .NET 6.0 is located in <install-dir>/dev/dotnet/bin/net6.0.

For a list of currently supported versions, see Supported .NET Versions in Using .NET with InterSystems Software.

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