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 – Refactoring Code to Reduce Database Calls
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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.
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…
Software Application Design – Required Reading
If you are involved in any way with software design and programming, you really must read the paper Magic Ink, Information Software and the Graphical Interface by Bret Victor. While you are at it, check out his entire web site worrydream.com. One point of particular interest to me was the section on ‘inferring content from…
Sending iCalendar events via a .Net Assembly and SQLServer stored procedure
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the iCalendar format is a standard way to send event information to a variety of email/scheduling systems (Outlook, Google, etc.). Here is a way to set it up so that you can simply call a stored procedure to send the event. This assumes you have SQL Server set up…
