It's been the bane of PowerBuilder development since day one. You have a DataWindow that contains one or more text blocks that, when previewed for printing or printed, span a page boundary. The result: the DataWindow incorrectly handles portions of the text. You may find some text on the first page that is repeated on the next page, or some text may be missing entirely, or the text may end up overwriting subsequent report objects. The bottom line is that the results are unusable, and it often takes a great deal of tweaking to get adequate results. The good news is that I found at least one method of addressing the issue. The bad news is that the path to get there was rather convoluted. This article describes both.

It may seem as if PowerBuilder programmers are bound to use global variables. Even the PFC, which is said to be the most successfully designed object-oriented framework, requires the use of global variables. Is it something in the nature of PowerBuilder that makes us use them? I won't discuss whether it's good or bad to use global variables as enough has been said on this subject. However, I am going to discuss why global variables are usually used in PowerBuilder applications and how we can live without them.

Did you ever wonder where your kids are driving around on a Saturday night? Perhaps you are a business owner and need to know where your workforce is located on different job sites. With the help of PowerBuilder, a wireless connection, a GPS receiver, and Microsoft MapPoint, you can track the location of any individual in real-time. This article will show you how.

A session-based synchronization technology designed to synchronize UltraLite and Adaptive Server Anywhere databases with many industry-standard SQL database management systems from Sybase and other vendors. We use it to synchronize data from one or more bookstores to a consolidated database running at their warehouse. This lets them run reports that aggregate data from many stores, transfer stock between stores, centralize purchasing, and do stock look-ups and one-time data entry,

My presentation at TechWave 2006 is intended for the beginner or the moderately experienced PowerBuilder developer. I hope to share some of the useful tips and tricks I have picked up in my 12 years as a PowerBuilder developer.

Software is the engine of our economy, at the root of almost everything we do. Our success rate has been creeping up in recent years, but one thing is sure: there has been no major breakthrough. What will it take?

The ClassDefinition object was introduced in PowerBuilder 6.0 a long time ago. It allows you to retrieve information for an object at runtime. Most of us didn't pay too much attention to this object and it only attracts our attention when we see it in the debugger.

If you've read any of my past articles, you know that I love a good challenge, a challenge that really gets me thinking and ultimately ends up teaching me something. One thing I always wanted to do was create dockable windows using pure PowerScript. I held off from doing this for some time because of the almost overwhelming complexity that was inherent with this type of control. Seeing as this would be the perfect test of my skills, I motivated myself to do it.

How can we reuse PowerBuilder NVOs in .NET applications? Before PowerBuilder 9.0, the answer was PowerBuilder automation or a three-tier solution.

A week ago one of my customers asked me to do a presentation on Sybase DataWindow.NET. We discussed what they would like to see (besides all the standard stuff all PowerBuilder shops want to see, such as a Master/Detail DataWindow in a client/server environment and, in a second step, these DataWindows within a browser), and they asked me to talk a little bit about distributing such a Web application in a production environment.

Unless you have been hiding in a cave for the past couple of years, you are probably well aware of the buzz surrounding service-oriented architecture (SOA). This concept of interaction among loosely coupled collections of components is often implemented through a series of services accessible over HTTP that processes requests and responses (Web services). As a PowerBuilder developer you may be wondering how you can join the SOA party while still leveraging your existing skills. This article will walk you through three techniques available to the PowerBuilder developer (even if you may not be on a currently supported version).

Why do a physical inventory? A physical inventory count is necessary to reconcile the quantity on hand stored in a database versus what is really on the shelf. In a retail environment, this process is typically done once a year. In a perfect world, these values would always be in sync.

Back in 1997, I was working on Riverston's HOW UML CASE tool, which was able to generate a full PowerBuilder application from adapted UML diagrams. This tool doesn't exist any more, but it showed us that there were other ways to explore application development with modeling, UML technology, and PowerBuilder.

Pbintelli is an application that helps PowerBuilder developers write code faster and more accurately.

In this article we'll examine how to handle a Jaguar CORBA_TRANSACTION_ ROLLEDBACK exception that is thrown when a Jaguar transaction is aborted. We'll use the BTFBank sample application developed in an article I wrote for PBDJ in October 1999 (Vol. 6, issue10). This example is written in PowerBuilder, but the technique covered here is relevant for any Jaguar client (Java, Web, etc.) or Jaguar component that's involved in a transaction.

In this month's column I'll show you how to use the PFC multitable update service. This service, as you might expect, allows the DataWindow to update more than one table. Multitable update, one of the least used PFC services, has been around since version 5.0. I'll demonstrate how you can use it, how it works and pitfalls you may find along the way.

If you want your DataWindows to look consistent, you have two basic choices. The first one - always code the DataWindow expressions the same in all your DataWindows. However, there are drawbacks to this: you have to make sure your entire development team is aware of the standards, and you have to have methods to ensure their use and document the standards for future developers. In spite of such precautions, it's likely your DataWindows will stray from the standards you've set up.

When you need 'today's date' in a client/server application, or a Web application for that matter, what date do you use? I had this discussion recently with Ed Foshko at Fidelity Investments. You might think the answer is easy - just use the appropriate function to get the date. Life as usual isn't that simple. You have at least three choices: the local computer, an application server or a database. Let's say you have an application in which you wish to capture a user's ID along with the date and time a record was updated. When the update occurs, make an entry in a logging table of some sort. This approach should enable you to determine who modified a record last...but does it?