Hi Ben;

   Normally, this type of migration from an older PB version like yours is mostly straightforward & automatic. The biggest challenge in your case is that PB9.x is an ANSI version while PB10.x versions & higher are Unicode. So you may need to refactor some single byte string manipulation into double byte equivalents.

   Here is a good migration guide to read in advance ...

https://docs.appeon.com/appeon_online_help/pb2019/migrating_pb_apps/index.html

Regards ... Chris

I'm fully in line with Chris on this one.

Major change is Unicode in PB 10. Which as consequence doubles all resource consumption for strings. Expect approx. double disk size + double memory usage; unless your app primarily deals with lots of numbers + dates/times while very few strings.

In PB 9 you have a fairly full-blown PowerBuilder version albeit several new controls and properties were added later. Watch out for your DBMS and DB driver versions. That is always worth extra focus when you jump a decade forward in PB versions. Same for Office integration. All-in-all I'd expect highest risk of issues in the interfaces between your PB app and any external apps your app communicates with.

Code originally written prior to PB 5 may have some odd features you should consider fixing. Things like:

• Hidden DataWindows.
  They act as DataStores that were new in PB 5.
• Loops to extract or insert large chunks of data in DataWindow buffers.
  PB 5 introduced .object notation and block-based get/set of data.
• Lots of instance variables or "chatty" objects that reach into each other for data.
  PB 5 introduced unmapped user events where you define parameters and return datatype.
• Lots of TriggerEvent/PostEvent( "…xxx..." )
  PB 5 introduced DYNAMIC keyword and easy way to POST function calls.
• SetActionCode(int) in ItemChanged, ItemError, etc.
  PB 5 replaced that with straightforward "RETURN int".

Wish you luck on the migration.

HTH /Michael

So that we can properly advise you on the upgrade, there is no such version as 9.5. The current version in 2012 was 12.5. Please double check the version and let us know.

regardless of version, it is probably just minor changes

just copy (backup) your PBLs to another directory, then start the new pb.  Make sure you create your database connection before you open up your PB app in the new version, then it will do an automatic migration.   it will list out all the problems it finds.

 It will be mostly minor fixes for powerbuilder/script.  Mostly bugs that old PB allowed, or bugs that happened to work the way you wanted them to.  Quite possibly no changes.   If you really are on a PB 9 version, then it will be fewer changes, but if you are on a older version, then expect more.

3rd party dlls and API calls will require ansi/unicode that chris has the info link for.  However, PB does a decent job in the migration of handling that.

the database driver changes may be your biggest set of changes if you used the really old sql sever native driver.  However, if you already used odbc/oledb or oracle you should be ok.  What database driver do you use?

It should be pretty straightforward, let us know if you need any help.

Regards

David