This article talks about the ease with which DataWindows can be designed and consumed in a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 environment. The DataWindow .NET version 2.5 has the infrastructure to support this concept. With the earlier versions of the DataWindow .NET, such as 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0, the .NET developers had to depend on a standalone DataWindow Designer tool to design DataWindows before consuming it in the .NET Windows Form or ASP.NET applications.

It will come as a surprise to no one that PowerBuilder's native graphing capabilities are somewhat lacking. Even the Define Graph Style dialog for the DataWindow graph style seems to have been left out of the GUI update in PowerBuilder 10.5 (see Figure 1). Forget Windows 95, this looks like something out of the version of Excel that came with Windows 3.1.

The current version runs with DataWindow.NET 2.0 and uses PowerBuilder 11 Web Services. To keep the installation slim it uses no database; instead the data is stored in DataWindows or XML files. Prognos makes use of AJAX techniques and accesses .NET classes from PowerBuilder for XML handling. Since it's used in Switzerland (which has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh) it's multilingual.

DataWindow display formats aren't a big secret. Most PowerBuilder developers use them to format numeric, date, time, and string values properly. Such display formats are usually straightforward and contain characters that have special meaning for a specific datatype like '#' for numeric values or '@' for string values. However, the DataWindow display format is a very powerful tool and you can get more than simple data formatting. This article explores what you can do with DataWindow display formats demonstrating a few tricks.

Let's suppose that you have a search window where a user can enter a search string and get the list of text items matching this pattern. Ideally, the portions of text that meet the search criteria should be highlighted, for example, by text formatting.

One of the first things you'll notice when you open up the File->New->DataWindow dialog in DataWindow Designer 2.0 is the new TreeView DataWindow presentation style (see Figure 1). Once you've double-clicked on that, you'll see the same series of dialogs that you're already familiar with from the other presentation styles in which you select the data source, the tables to use, the columns in the tables, etc.

Microsoft Visual Studio has excellent multi-language support both at design time and runtime, while Sybase DataWindow.NET doesn't have that. In this article we'll consider how to implement multi-language data presentation using DataWindow.NET. DataWindow.NET has two integral parts. One of them is intended to work in WinForms, the other in WebForms. In this article we'll use WinForms; however, our solutions are suitable for WebForms too.

In the early 1990s, before Windows 98, before Windows 95, before Windows NT, even before Windows 3.1, the DataWindow was being hatched by a small team of developers in Massachusetts. By small, I mean a single developer, Kim Sheffield - the 'Father of the DataWindow.'

Last month we saw how DataWindow.NET technology can be a benefit when used for data presentation and data access in a Windows Forms (WinForms) application. This month we're going to look at how DataWindow.NET technology is a simpler but more powerful way of formatting data in the presentation layer.

Last month we looked at Microsoft's .NET Pet Shop sample application and saw how DataWindow.NET technology could be used in the data access layer of an ASP.NET-based application to reduce the its complexity and increase developer productivity.

PowerBuilder novices know the problem as well as seasoned PowerBuilder developers. You build a window in the window painter. You arrange the controls on the window and the layout looks fine.

I recently had the opportunity to rewrite one of our major data entry systems. This system processes payments on a monthly basis, either individually or submitted as a group under an administration company - rather like companies that have a third party handle their payroll.

Let's face it - rewriting an existing application from platform to platform is not fun. But many businesses successfully served with PowerBuilder applications are rewriting parts of PB apps for the Web and maintaining the same functionality in PowerBuilder and Java, PowerBuilder and C#, etc.

In the coding life of every programmer there's often a need to create a view of data that extends variably both to the right and vertically. Using a grid presentation style usually solves this problem. But what about when a programmer needs more control over presentation style?

The development of the Web DataWindow is a great technological advancement. It's extremely helpful in moving an existing PowerBuilder application to the Web. Most PowerBuilder applications contain many DataWindows for the various screens and reports. The ability to quickly render these controls as HTML in a browser is a huge timesaver.

We've spent two articles now on Sherlock (PBDJ, Vol. 7, issues 8 and 10). This is an application that will use dynamic DataWindows to create reports for the example database provided with PowerBuilder. Using this tool we'll learn about dynamic DataWindows and how to create them.

A component that's sitting on EAServer doesn't do us any good unless we call it from somewhere. We may call these components from several different sources. In this article we'll call them from the Active Server Pages (ASP) front end.

To this day my mother refuses to make deposits via her bank's ATM. Her reason is a valid one: she doesn't trust a machine with her money. You get no real validation from the ATM, just a receipt stating the amount you said was in your envelope.

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 another application to download. It in fact does the downloading.

My first column on Sherlock appeared in the August issue of PBDJ (Vol. 7, issue 8). In that article we set up our development environment. Now we need to log in. Before we do that let's review just a bit.

Imagine creating a DropDownDataWindow look and feel using HTML form elements that can show more than one column in a ListBox on a Web page. The data elements could be generated using Web server-side technologies such as JavaServer Pages (JSP), Active Server Pages (ASP), and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). This look and feel is similar to the JTable class of Java or the DB grid control in Visual Basic.

This issue of PBDJ contains an article written by Tom Hughes that provides us with a service object quite suitable for traditional two-tier applications. My article shows how to expand that technology and move the object to a Jaguar component so we can handle e-mail from a central spot. This serves two purposes. It gives us something we can use in our own shops and allows me to introduce some practical applications of the Web DataWindow.

'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 on the DataWindow.

Okay, it's a common enough observation - heck, it may even be a cliché - but ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, some clichés are true: presentation is everything.

We've finally reached the end of this series - the fifth and final installment on graphing techniques. By the end of this article you should know enough about graphing to be really good at it. There's still a lot about graphing that I haven't covered, but there's a lot to discuss about other topics as well.

So far we've made significant headway in our understanding of graphing. In our first exercise (PBDJ, Vol. 7, issue 1) we learned some of the basics. The next three articles (PBDJ, Vol. 7, issues 2, 3 and 4) concerned line graphs. We created a simple one and added tool tips to it. In my last article we explored the series; using series we were able to plot the performance of one sales item against another.

In my previous articles on graphing (PBDJ, Vol. 7, issues 2 and 3) we created a simple line graph. We then extended the graph in order to have a tool tip that would work with it. This article will expand on that idea and show you how to do a series. My next article will begin exploring the more advanced features of graphing.

In my last article (PBDJ, Vol. 7, issue 2) I described how to create a simple application for unit testing, and then explained a simple line graph that went with it. This month we'll build on that concept, using some techniques I showed you in an earlier article (Vol. 7, issue 1) on ToolTips. The goal is to take last month's application and expand it somewhat, using a line chart like the one in Figure 1.

When I sit down to write this column I always ask myself, 'What can I write that will be the most help to DataWindow programmers?' At the moment I'm also in the final production stages of my new book, The Definitive DataWindow. This morning, while glancing at my chapter on 'Graphing,' I remembered that this is an area not well understood by many people. In addition, an awful lot can be said about graphing, maybe enough for a series of articles.

A tool tip, which appears in several modern applications, is a small text area that floats over an object when the cursor comes to rest on it. Microsoft Word has it - in fact, PowerBuilder itself incorporates tool tips. Rest your cursor on any item in the toolbar and a moment later a tip will appear. In Figure 1, which shows this in action, the cursor was placed over the Library menu button, and after a moment the word Library appeared (in black letters on a yellow background).

One of the typical problems developers face when using the HTML DataWindow (HTML DW) is that there's no SetRowFocusIndicator() method to allow users to see which row is the current one. This can confuse the user and lead to errors. For example, without a current row indicator users may not know which row will be deleted when they press a Delete button. This article describes a simple and effective technique for addressing this problem.

When I sit down to write this column I always ask myself, 'What can I write that will be the most help to DataWindow programmers?' At the moment I'm also in the final production stages of my new book, The Definitive DataWindow. This morning, while glancing at my chapter on 'Graphing,' I remembered that this is an area not well understood by many people. In addition, an awful lot can be said about graphing, maybe enough for a series of articles.

You stumble on a bug in your application. In order to troubleshoot it you need to see the raw data inside your DataWindow but the columns you need aren't visible. ... You open a window in your application, and even though you don't change any of its data it still prompts you to save when closing. What has changed? ... A drop-down DataWindow isn't displaying the right values at runtime, but it retrieves just fine when you preview it at design time. Where's the data? ... You're pulling your hair out trying to get some modify/describe syntax to work, and it's taking forever between changing your code, saving and rerunning your application. Can you possibly get the syntax right and still get home on time?

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.