DataWindow Formatting Tip

This is from Chris Werner in the Sybase newsgroups.  Someone asked if there was a way to improve the formatting of data in a grid datawindow that uses cell borders by forcing a leading or trailing space on the data.  Chris' response:

I'm not sure if it is documented behaviour but sometimes I use a blank in the format of a datawindow column to achieve what you want. For instance for right-aligned number you can use "0 " instead of "0", for left-aligned strings " [general]" works. Of course the will not work if the data is bigger than the column and cut.

Perhaps what stuns me the most is that after many years of PowerBuilder use, I had never tried this.  Great tip.

PowerBuilder Accelerated Development Tour

The PowerBuilder Accelerated Development Tour is making it's swing through the U.S.  Currently scheduled stops are Dallas and Houston, with more to be announced soon.

Sometimes it pays to read the instructions…

First, some background. I got myself a new Dell XPS M1530 laptop for Christmas. One of the accessories I ordered with it was a Kesington sd200v docking station.

PocketBuilder Nominated for Development Tool of the Year

In the mobile category (of course). Vote quickly, as voting ends on December 15th.

Reading and writing a blob in chunks

At least with Oracle using the DBMS_LOB package. The issue with using SELECTBLOB and UPDATEBLOB is that you have to store the entire blob in memory. That could create an issue if you're trying to process extremely large amounts of data. Fortunately, there are options to pass the data in smaller, more bite size chunks.

Surviving a recession…

Rather good article on what software developers to help survive a recession.

Some issues with PBTrace

One of the new features added beginning with PowerBuilder 10.2 was the ability to toggle database tracing on and off by setting the PBTrace parameter to either 0 or 1 in the DBParm attribute of the transaction object.

Techno-kitten.com reference