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PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – SyntaxFromSql and System Fonts

Posted on July 12, 2012 at 5:56 pm in

So a user of an application I work on is getting an error when opening a window which contains a dynamic datawindow. The open process reads a table and then dynamically creates a grid datawindowobject with the same number of columns as the data which is retrieved from the table. The process itself uses the…

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PowerBuilder ‘Gotcha’ – Grid Datawindows with Picture Controls

Posted on June 27, 2012 at 6:14 pm in

So I’m working on a ‘dashboard’ style datawindow in an application which shows a grid of data along with some graphics so the user can easily see changes/important stuff. There are a number of reasons to use a grid datawindow for this, especially since they can easily be changed by the user to suit their…

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PowerBuilder – Using C# Visual Objects in PB Classic Applications

Posted on June 18, 2012 at 5:16 pm in

This article will explain how to build a COM visual component in C# using Visual Studio 2010; it is an extension of my earlier example of using the Interop Forms Toolkit to build a Visual Basic COM object. First you need to install the Microsoft Interop Toolkit (available here). Then download the C# Interop Form…

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PowerBuilder – Timing Out a Windows Session

Posted on June 12, 2012 at 6:25 pm in

There are a variety of techniques to locking or timing out an application after a certain amount of inactivity. With earlier versions of Windows (XP and prior) a common approach was to invoke the screen saver via a Send command. send(handle(This),274,61760,0) This doesn’t work with Windows 7 (or Vista). Try the following: integer li_rc OleObject…

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PowerBuilder – Using .Net Visual Controls in PB Classic Applications

Posted on June 5, 2012 at 5:27 pm in

This article describes the techniques and code used during my presentations at the Carolina Code Camp 2012 and at the May 2012 meeting of the North Carolina PowerBuilder User Group. The techniques described here utilize Visual Basic .Net (coded in Visual Studio 2010) with the Interop Forms Toolkit available from Microsoft. The Interop Forms Toolkit…

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PowerBuilder – Resizing a Response Window or User Object

Posted on May 23, 2012 at 5:16 pm in

Here is a technique you can use to resize a response window or userobject as needed. It makes use of the GetWindowLong and SetWindowLong Windows API methods. The oldest reference I found to this is from Eric Aling back in 2000. In a nutshell, you are changing the border around the object to one which…

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PowerBuilder – Discarding Rows with Find

Posted on May 10, 2012 at 5:37 pm in

It’s a fairly common practice to report on a set of data derived from a larger group of rows. There are many techniques to do this in code and with the methods available with datawindows/datastores. One typical approach is to use the Filter method. The problem with this is it requires another trip to the…

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PowerBuilder – Determining if Controls Overlap

Posted on May 2, 2012 at 5:32 pm in

I had a situation where I needed to know if the user is clicking on a control which is underneath a rectangle on a datawindow. In this case the interior of the rectangle was transparent. ls_name = dwo.name IF (left(ls_name, 2) = 'r_') THEN // my standard rectangle naming convention ls_objects = this.Describe( 'DataWindow.Objects') ls_objects…

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PowerBuilder – Fontheight method in Expressions

Posted on February 29, 2012 at 2:29 am in

An enhancement was put into PB12.1 dealing with determining the height of a datawindow column based on its font setting. It’s called Fontheight and takes a string parameter. Unfortunately there does not appear to be any documentation on it in the PB help files (I’m looking in PB12.5). You can see a reference to it…

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Coding for Amateurs

Posted on February 27, 2012 at 5:02 pm in

Bumped into this code the other day. Hmmmm… //b_paint_good is a boolean set somewhere else IF NOT b_paint_good THEN //do not do something here [code follows] ELSE // do something here [more code follows] END IF Now what’s the point of this? Trying to raise the defect count on your software (in the immortal words…

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