POWERBUILDER AND GRAPH DATABASES

Because I could find nothing, anywhere, regarding PowerBuilder (PB) and graph databases (GDB), I thought I’d provide some information following some dabbling with this emerging (well, emerged now) technology.

I developed a keen interest in GDBs after a contracting friend who does some work for me had attended a NEO4J course – he contacted me and said the application I develop would be ideally suited for a GDB.

I looked at NEO4J and quickly realised the code would not fit with the PB my application.  Then another friend advised that MS SQLServer had introduced basic graph DB features in its 2017 version, with enhancements expected to follow.   I gave it a try.

(I should point out that I’m not an experienced programmer - self-taught, I work alone so I can’t learn from peers, too busy on my work to go off and learn new skills, long in the tooth, and need to get a twelve-year-old to change my digital watch at daylight savings.  So the caveat is that experienced programmers may know ways far better than I’ll lay out here.)

With the release of PowerBuilder 2017 a new native method of exporting DataWindows to PDF became available.  There were some enhancements to that functionality added in R2 and in R3 that we're going to look at in this article.

The support for PostgreSQL that was added in R2 was covered in an earlier blog post.  The enhancements in R3 are primarily related to addition entries added to the PBODB170.INI file.  These additional entries provide more support for maintaining tables, views, primary and foreign keys, users and groups in the database painter.  

In an article on the enhancements that were added to the stand alone compiler in R2, I remarked on an issue on how file version information was handled in the initial release, and which was still a problem in R2.  Fortunately, R3 corrects that issue.

Support for using SVN as a source control system without going through a bridge product was added in 2017 R2 and covered in a previous blog post.  In this blog post we're going to look at the enhancements that were added to that feature in 2017 R3. 

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 introduces support for encoding and encrypting data, something of particular interest when using REST web services.  We're going to take a look at those new features. 

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 added a number of REST features, which I covered in a previous blog post.  One area for improvement on the original feature was better support for REST authentication methods.  The HTTPClient and RESTClient objects provided methods to set request headers, but doing the legwork needed for some of the more complex authentication mechanism (i.e., OAuth) were left to the developer.  PowerBuilder 2017 R3 addresses that.  In this blog post we'll look at using this new feature.