Latest News from Konstantin Goldobin

Make Your Design Ideas Speak: Using UML in PowerBuilder Projects

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:30:00 EDT

A picture is worth a thousand words. We all have heard this saying a countless number of times. But what if you don’t understand what is drawn in the picture? I was approached once with a request to review requirements specifications for some module. The document contained a scheme that represented the place of the module within the system. The picture was mainly made of rectangles and arrows.

Working with Legacy Applications

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:15:00 EST

When I was just starting my career in programming, I thought I would be creating new applications. And I did - I created a few applications from scratch. Maybe two or three of them. But for the most part what I've been doing is working with code written by someone else a while ago - legacy code. What is legacy code? You could define legacy code as ancient applications that were written in the past.

Getting Rid of Global Variables

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:00:00 EDT

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.

Exploring DataWindow Display Formats

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:00:00 EDT

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.

Highlighting Selected Text in PowerBuilder DataWindow

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:45:00 EDT

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.