PowerBuilder can create an entire application from the object source files stored in a source code control system without relying on existing PBLs. This has been public knowledge for years, but since I cannot find the article anymore where I read about this for the first time, and since I still see people saying the opposite, I decided to put together this short how-to guide hoping that this information will become searchable.

If someone knows the link to the original article, I will be happy to include it here or even replace this article with the link.

12/26/2021 Update:  A PowerBuilder 2021 sample app that includes all of the following code is available in CodeXchange at: https://community.appeon.com/index.php/codeexchange/powerbuilder/306-reading-a-smard-card-from-powerbuilder

We’re going to look at using the Smart Card SDK provided in more recent versions of Windows (XP and later).  Earlier versions of Windows had an ActiveX installed called CAPICOM which could be accessed from PowerBuilder through OLE Automation, but that control was removed as of Windows Vista because of security issues.

We’re going to look at a number of operations:

·         Communication with the card

·         Validating the user’s PIN

·         Reading the certificate Subject Name

·         Reading other certificate data

 
Note:  This post was updated on December 8th, 2021 to support 64 bit compilation.  Thanks to Jason Schultz for pointing out the problem and to John Fauss and others for pointing out the necessary changes.

Communicating with the card

The first step is establish a context for the API calls.  To do that, we need to declare the following local external function for SCardEstablishContext:

And call it as follows:

Note:  This blog entry is basically the written version of a video I did for the SAP Database and Technology Academy.  You can either watch the video or read the blog entry, or both if you're so inclined.

One PDF capability that still hasn't been introduced as a native feature in PowerBuilder is the ability to merge PDF files. We're going to look at how we can easily add that capability using the open source (LGPL) PoDoFo library.

FYI -

Summary:
   You can create multiple databases from a single PostgreSQL driver.

Details:
PowerBuilder R2019R3
PostgreSQL 12
Windows 10

These instructions assume that at least one PostgreSQL driver has been successfully installed onto the Windows 10 platform.

Since PowerBuilder 2017 R2, we have a new HTTPClient object, which is a base object for sending HTTP requests and receiving HTTP responses from a resource identified by a URI. Compared to the Inet object, the HTTPClient object is easier to use and supports more methods (Get/Post/Put/Delete) and more SSL protocols (TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.2, SSL 2.0, and SSL 3.0).

Among other things, the HTTPClient can be also used to consume SOAP Web services. This is particularly useful as the Web Service Proxy has many limitations and defects calling SOAP Web services such as not supporting TLS 1.2. This article is to show how you can use the new HTTPClient to call your existing SOAP Web services instead.