An annoyance in a PB window with a datawindow control on it is if you back tab to the dw, your cursor is positioned to the first field and not the last field. The following technique can eliminate that and make your application a bit more user friendly. In the Getfocus event of the datawindow:…
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PowerBuilder – Back Tab to Last Field in DataWindow
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PowerBuilder – Refactoring Code to Reduce Database Calls
So I’m working on a fairly large enhancement to an application which is about twelve years old. In a nutshell it involves allowing users to see data for multiple sites and multiple locations within each site. Originally the app was created so the user could only view a single site at a time. Which sites…
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PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – Tooltips do not display
I was working on setting up datawindow tooltips for a project and ran into an issue where sometimes they would not display for specific columns on the datawindow. Here is what you have to do: The tooltip Enabled property must be TRUE. The tooltip text must not be an empty string or NULL. The tooltip…
Windows 7 ‘Gotcha’ – PowerBuilder Application Control Fonts Too Large
So I finally got my computer upgraded to Windows 7 at work. I was very happy to have it since XP was really starting to annoy me and I couldn’t really do some of the development tasks I needed to get done. After a week or so I started looking through the applications I work…
PowerBuilder – Writing to the Windows Event Log
Here are two ways to write to the Event log in Windows and indicate the source of the message. Reportevent External Function and Eventcreate command line command You can use the command shell to do this too but this has the drawback of not being able to assign the source of the event. First you need…
PowerBuilder – Datawindow Usability Improvements
I did a presentation at the 2012 PowerBuilder Developers Conference on improving the user experience in older PowerBuilder applications. Later in December 2012 I presented an abstract of that on PowerBuilder TV. The recorded session can be found here. I have updated the presentation files along with exports of the PB objects so that folks…
Datawindow Usability Improvements Presentation
You can find the files from my PBTV presentation here. I’ll do an in depth article later for those who could not attend the session. This is an extract from the session I presented at the SAP PowerBuilder Developers Conference 2012.
Getting your COM component Registered for use with PowerBuilder
I built a COM component to allow for the taking of pictures from a webcam in PowerBuilder. The component itself was done in Visual Studio 2010 in C# and makes use of a web camera control created to use the Directshow API library available as part of the Windows SDK. You can find more information…
PowerBuilder – Update the Datawindow object definition programatically
I’m doing some work on an application to aid in the mass update of various datawindow attributes. It’s not rocket science since you are dealing with a series of text files and doing some basic ‘find and replace’ operations. However, if you have ever worked on a project which has been around for a while…
PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – Column lists do not match
This is more of a database driver error but I encountered it within a datawindow I was working on so PB gets credit. I was working on a generic data drill down control which has a filtering process to eliminate data based on a date argument. Since I also wanted this date value for other…
