Richard (Rik) Brooks

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... (more)

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 a few columns from the employee table. Here is my sql for the DataWindow in Figure 1. Once we ... (more)

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 functio... (more)

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... (more)

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 ... (more)

We are going to create a bare-bones email object. Of course you can expand that in the future if you like, but for now, let's just create the functionality that we need. I start by creating a custom class. In case you aren't familiar with the process look at Figure 1. Let's st... (more)

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 F... (more)

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 wor... (more)

Dear Cliff, You would salivate at the stuff I'm doing. If you thought PowerBuilder was nice, Jaguar blows it clean away. The stuff I'm doing with Jaguar is beyond belief. Just to catch you up, Jaguar is an application server. Actually it's only one small part of a piece of soft... (more)

In the October issue of PBDJ we worked on the design for our mail server on Jaguar. This is more accurately called an MDA, or Mail Delivery Agent. What we're writing isn't the application that will receive raw messages from the Internet, parse them out, then store them for anothe... (more)

"Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, we hope you will attend, step inside, step inside." Those words - from an old song by Emerson, Lake and Palmer - have been floating through my head all day, ever since I decided on the subject of my next series of articles o... (more)