Paul Harvey, the great American radio personality, would always conclude his colorful broadcasts with the quip “And now you know the rest of the story.” For those of you not acquainted with Paul’s broadcasts, here’s a sample. If you get to about 3:40 in, you’ll hear the classic remark....

This article provides a means of automating the sorting of DataWindows... not just grid DataWindows as discussed in last month’s article, but all DataWindows, regardless of display format. Bear in mind that we are writing programmer tools. When writing for programmers we want to give ...

PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. We’re going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We’re also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that ...

PowerBuilder has a very handy way to make data entry more convenient: the DropDownDataWindow and DropDownListBox edit styles for DataWindow columns. Indeed, it’s much simpler to pick up a value from a look-up list than to type it in each time you need to enter it. However, it looks lik...

By the time you are reading this, PB12.5 will have been released and work on PB15 well under way. A lot of exciting things have gone into the .NET version of PB but we still get requests for features to go into the Classic version of the product. Even though there was a lull in activit...

As we all know, the DataWindow is a very powerful and flexible control used for data presentation and manipulation. For the most part, the features that you get out of the box allow you to create some very impressive applications. With that said, there is always room for improvement. F...

This article will focus on Software Inventory Control Systems (SICS). Recently, I was asked by Bill Rogers (NH DoIT Commissioner) and Peter Hastings (NH DoIT Director) to take a look at SICS, investigate them and provide a recommendation. When I started this research I knew nothing abo...

Your application has a window containing custom visual user objects (CVUOs) that require system services in their constructor events. Obviously, the services must be resident and active before the CVUO constructor is invoked. Using globals (functions, or NVO references) is one approach...

Okay, so I've been promoting the inclusion of PB client/server articles, yet here I am writing about the Web DataWindow. Don't stop reading! This article applies to all PB developers, whether n-tier or client/server. That said, I now have to prove that this article is important to clie...

Part 2 of "RESTful Web Services: A Quick-Start How-To Guide" explores foundational issues in coding RESTful operations, including Basic Authentication and Exception handling. Along the way I’ll share with you multiple real-world coding tips and workarounds. As a teenager, one of my fa...

This is the third and final part of a series presenting a proposal for the use of the tag property of DataWindow columns. My original thought was to provide a means to automatically set a microhelp for each column. Of course, if you are using an MDI application you have a function to s...

Under heavy Confederate fire, wounded, surrounded, with one third of his men lost, Union General John Corse is holding the fort on the top of the hill in the US Civil War battle of Altoona. Peering into the distance, he sees a white signal flag waving. It is a message from General Sher...

Sofrepost, a subsidiary of La Poste (the French mail), develops and sells SPS, a management system for post offices. Our clients are national postal systems from a dozen countries on several continents. SPS is composed of five packaged applications developed with PowerBuilder that rep...

Among PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET’s new features comes the ability to use WCF to call RESTful web services. This article, the first in a two-part series, provides a PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET developer with the foundational knowledge and skills to rapidly get up and running building PowerBuilde...

This is the second part of a two-part article. In the last article we learned how to use the tag property to create our own microhelp and automate it. In this article we are going to go one step further and use the tag property for other things. The list of items that I used the tag p...

Have you ever seen a form that has its own microhelp that changes when a field gets focus? I’m sure you have. You might see a window and at the bottom of the window is a line that says, “OPTIONAL – Enter the employee birth date,” when a field is entered. We are going to create a simple...

This month the article is not exclusively about DataWindows. To be sure it is about DataWindows, just not exclusively so. This month we are going to have to stretch our skills just a little. The goal is to replace SQLCA with something a little more robust. Essentially we are going to ...

This article will describe the development of a fairly large (over 4,000 users) one-man software business, selling an application developed with PowerBuilder. I’ll touch on a number of technical issues I encountered in the development of the program and the business. The DONATION pro...

Application partitioning is a hot topic lately. If you’ve been following my articles in this publication and in ISUG Journal, you are no doubt beginning to get the picture of what application partitioning is all about. You now know that an application has three logical layers: user int...

There are all kinds of pies, chicken pot pie, shepherd’s pie, cherry pie and of course good ol’ American apple pie. Every host or hostess knows that pies are perfect circles. There are infinite ways to divide and serve them. They can be cut in halves, thirds, quarters, eighths, sixteen...

One of the most useful custom objects that I’ve ever written is my master_detail object. It holds a prominent place in my toolkit. This article will take you through the steps of how to write one and in the process de-mystify the object. First we want something that looks like Figure ...

One of the main goals of PowerBuilder Classic application refactoring is to divide the code into logical partitions. Although you will likely not gain significant performance increases in exchange for your efforts, you will achieve two other highly significant gains. First, your logic ...

Service objects were introduced for PowerBuilder at about the same time as the PowerBuilder Foundation Classes. Much like the PFC, most programmers found reasons not to use them. In this article we will reduce the complexity of these objects and in so doing perhaps open a new world of ...

Part of the allure of the .NET platform is that all code, no matter what language or grammar it’s written in, compiles down to Common Intermediate Language (CIL) that is managed and executed by the Common Language Runtime (CLR). PowerScript code goes through a two-step process before b...

This article will focus on the upgrade process from AllFusion Harvest Change Manager R7.1 to CA Software Change Manager (SCM) R12.0.2. I am writing this article because I recently went through this process and felt it would be beneficial to share this experience with other users in the...

XAML data binding is a codeless (declarative) way of transferring information from one object to another. It’s very helpful in a UI where data originating in one object controls a characteristic of (or is the source of data displayed in) another object. Data binding’s main benefit is t...

This article will focus on the PowerBuilder Build Process using E. Crane Computing product PowerGen with CA Software Change Manager (SCM) R12.0.2. I am writing this article because we recently upgraded to SCM R12 and it was a good time to visit our PowerBuilder build process and see wh...

In PowerBuilder, an event is used as a place to put code in reaction to something. The .NET world uses events differently and, in my opinion, more appropriately. In .NET, an event is just notification that something happened. This lets other objects react to changes while PowerBuilder’...

If you don’t know the words to this classic folk song, here they are: Oh, the old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, Ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, Many long years ago. I can’t count how many times I hea...

While there is literature describing how to use .NET controls in PB (see for example, past issues of this magazine), all are silent on how to set control properties at runtime and how to persist them. This article will address both issues. Like regular OLE controls, you can allow you...

We make EMR (Electronic Medical Record) Software. Being users ourselves, our development approach has been entirely from the users’ perspective. The ease and simplicity of the PowerBuilder development environment deserves due credit for the relative success of our efforts. Our main dev...

As software developers, our mission is to deliver positive, technology-based solutions – software that provides both the means and the method for working faster, performing better, achieving more. There is little doubt that the technologies we create provide users with the control and ...

There has been some talk lately about the impact of the new .NET PBL and EXE format on applications that dynamically integrate InfoMaker reports (or other external PBLs). The concern is that since PowerBuilder has gone .NET and InfoMaker remains Classic, platform differences will break...

PowerBuilder has very good online help and documentation that extensively covers most aspects of programming with PowerBuilder. However, from time to time you’ll come across a problem that you can’t find an answer to in the online help or documentation. If a search on the Internet does...

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous articles (“Refactoring Is Not an ‘R’ Word, [PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12] and “Refactoring Classic PowerBuilder Applications Using TDD and pbUnit” [PBDJ, Vol. 17, issue 1) you read why refac...

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous article, “Refactoring Is Not an ‘R’ Word” (PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12), you read why refactoring code before migration helps ensure smooth migration and enterprise integration. You were in...

The database has changed. Or at the very least it is changing, possibly quite rapidly. One of the major influences driving this change is the In-memory DBMS (IMDB). Some argue that the IMDB has emerged specifically to meet the needs of embedded systems and as is evidenced by the very n...

This article will discuss what Enterprise Architecture is, why you need it and how you can achieve it. The term Enterprise Architecture (EA) can mean different things to different people. For the confines of this article, we will use a definition from Paul Weill, Director of MIT Center...

For many releases of PB Classic, the object painters allowed the user to open views to see various parts of the edited object, such as Layout, and Control List. This feature allowed for each view to be customized to its contents, but it also meant that you really never had a complete s...

PowerBuilder 12 has been released. The new version represents a huge leap forward as far as support for .Net development, particularly reflected by the introduction of a new .Net IDE based on the Visual Studio Isolated Shell. That doesn’t mean that people who aren’t doing .Net developm...