Rik Brooks has been programming in PowerBuilder since the final beta release before version 1. He has authored or co-authored five books on PowerBuilder including “The Definitive DataWindow”. Currently he lives in Mississippi and works in Memphis, Tennessee.
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 ...Feb. 3, 2012 12:00 PM EST Reads: 1,027
This article describes how to create a grid presentation window that allows sorting by clicking on the column header.
To begin we need to create a grid DataWindow. I’m selecting just few columns from the employee table. Here is my sql for the DataWindow in Figure 1.
Once we have crea...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
