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 – Getting the Display Value from a Drop Down DataWindow
This is very basic functionality but easily forgotten. Say you have a datawindow built from the ‘part’ table and a column for partType is a DDDW. You want the description of the partType code (which is displayed in the row showing the parts). To do this you use the evaluate method with the describe method…
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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…
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.
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…
PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – Strings, Describe and Position Attributes
So I’m getting the position attributes of a column in a datawindow to aid in the display of another visual object. What I initially coded was this: ll_open_x = Long(adw.describe(as_colname + '.X') + & adw.describe(as_colname + '.height')) + 10 I run the window and my visual object is no where to be seen. Looking in…
PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – Invalid Expression Error Message
So customer support calls regarding an issue a client is experiencing on a periodic basis. The receive an error ‘Invalid Expression’. To make things worse they get a series of these messages popping up and eventually the application crashes. Great. So we look at the datawindow object on the application window they are having issues…
