If you're familiar with the Database Binary / Text Large Object column type in PowerBuilder Classic (see Figure 1), you know it's a way of storing blob data associated with an OLE Automation application (Paint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel) and then displaying it as part of a DataWindow.

There were some limitations with the Database Binary / Text Large Object. It required the end user to have the application that was used to add the object to the database in order to view the data. It often didn't display the data well within the DataWindow. And it wrapped the data stored in the database with an OLE wrapper, making it difficult to deal with the data outside of the OLE Automation application used to store it.

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous article, "Refactoring Is Not an ‘R' Word" (PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12), you read why refactoring code before migration helps ensure smooth migration and enterprise integration. You were introduced to Test Driven Development methodology and saw how you can use it to ensure successful refactoring. You were also introduced to pbUnit, an open source tool and framework that you can use for both refactoring and developing new code in PB Classic applications. In this article I'll guide you through installing pbUnit and help you master the basic algorithm when refactoring your PB legacy code with pbUnit and test driven methodology.

Installing pbUnit and Configuring Your App: The Nuts and Bolts
In addition to installing and using pbUnit with Classic PowerBuilder to run unit Tests, you'll also learn how to get your code under test so you can go about refactoring your code with confidence. After that, I'll show you how to do a couple of refactorings to thin out a GUI and partition business and data logic

Now is the time to take that old code and whip it into shape. You suspect that unit test drive development has some merit and would like to try it out. This article will show you how to get started.

There are a couple of ways you can get your hands on pbUnit. You can download a PB v10.2 version from the Sybase CodeXchange. This version will migrate without error to version 10.5, 11.x or 12.0 Classic. Point your browser to http://www.sybase.com/developer/codexchange, then proceed to the PowerBuilder section and find pbUnit. You'll want to take version 3.2. Alternatively, if you want me know that you're trying out TDD, you can drop me an email and I'll send you a zip with a PB 12.0 compatible version. I didn't change the doc since I didn't make any changes to the code. I upped the version number on my zip to 3.3 to indicate the change.

This article seems like it should be the fourth in a series of articles. The first two were on non-visual components in August 2006 and July of 2007. The last one was in August of 2007. In that one, we looked at using the Interop Forms Toolkit to provide a COM wrapper for Visual .NET components - essentially making them ActiveX controls - so that PowerBuilder could use them. That article focused primarily on getting the visual component to display within PowerBuilder and being able to invoke functions on it. What we didn't look at then was allowing PowerBuilder to respond to events on the visual component. That's what we'll look at in this article.

It's been the bane of PowerBuilder development since day one. You have a DataWindow that contains one or more text blocks that, when previewed for printing or printed, span a page boundary. The result: the DataWindow incorrectly handles portions of the text. You may find some text on the first page that is repeated on the next page, or some text may be missing entirely, or the text may end up overwriting subsequent report objects. The bottom line is that the results are unusable, and it often takes a great deal of tweaking to get adequate results. The good news is that I found at least one method of addressing the issue. The bad news is that the path to get there was rather convoluted. This article describes both.

Beginning with PowerBuilder 9, the DataWindow has had the capability of exporting into XSLFO (XSL formatting objects) format. XSLFO is a variation of XML that contains formatting information in addition to the data. It is intended for use by a FOP (formatting objects processor) to render into any number of final output formats (e.g., PDF, RTF, HTML, etc.). In some sense it's similar to HTML, in that it contains formatting information and also because the syntax is somewhat similar. If you want to learn more about the actual structure and syntax of XSLFO documents, I recommend the tutorial on the w3schools site: http://w3schools.sinsixx.com/xslfo/default.asp.htm. Referring to that may be helpful when I start discussing some of the current limitations of PowerBuilder's XSLFO implementation. There is another good tutorial at the RenderX site: www.renderx.com/tutorial.html. If you want to work directly with XSLFO documents and render them to PDF manually to see the result, I'd recommend the editX editor: www.editix.com/

Microsoft recently released the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 in order to allow "developers to incorporate VB.NET Forms and Controls into their VB6 applications" (www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? FamilyID=934de3c5-dc85-4065-9327-96801e57b81d&DisplayLang=en).

The interesting thing is that it operates by automatically generating a COM Callable Wrapper (CCW) for the VB.NET forms and controls. That means that the .NET visual user controls are not only available to VB6, but to any Win32 application that supports COM, including PowerBuilder.

To test it out, I wrote a simple gradient user object in VB.NET (see Listing 1) and deployed it as an interop user control. I then added it to a PowerBuilder 10.5 window as an ActiveX (see Figure 1).

Everything on the window, with the exception of the gradient control, is standard PowerBuilder stuff. After some simple calculations to determine the combined RGB value the user has selected through the sliders and display it, it is applied to the gradient control through the following (of_calcstart and of_calcend are the routines used to calculate the RGB values):

long ll_start, ll_end
ll_start = of_calcstart()
ll_end = of_calcend()

//This will actually cause two repaints, but I don't care
ole_1.object.StartColor = ll_start
ole_1.object.EndColor = ll_end

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.

So what would we want from updated graphing capabilities? I can think of a few important features:

1. Something that would work equally well in a Web application as a client/server one.
2. Transitions, to allow some animation in the graphic during its initial display.
3. Click-through, making it possible to respond to actions on the chart to drill down into additional information, whether it be additional charts or just access to the underlying data.
4. More control over the generation of the chart. For example, for 3D pie charts we should be able to explode segments and have control over the amount each segment is exploded.
5. An updated look-and-feel. That's a little hard to put into words, but what we want to do is make Figure 2 look like Figure 3.

Back in August of 2006, I wrote an article about calling .NET components from PowerBuilder using COM wrappers (i.e., CCW). Since I was basing it on a registry entry approach, the technique demonstrated required the component to be added to the GAC, which in turn required that we create a strong name and sign the assembly (besides having it compiled as a COM-visible assembly).

You don't always have access to the GAC or the registry of the machine that you need to deploy your application to. Well, fortunately we have some options. Beginning with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the Microsoft operating systems allowed the use of manifest files rather than registry entries for loading COM components. It not only works for regular COM components, but for .NET components that have been exposed as COM-visible. The only difference is how the manifest file is structured.

If you want further information on the details, I'd recommend the following resources: