Source code forward declarations question
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- Advice
-
Jim Reese
- PowerBuilder
- Wednesday, 15 July 2026 08:31 PM UTC
We thought we were seeing possible object corruption in our 20+ year old application. It appeared that several objects had duplicate type definitions in the source code, so we removed the duplicates. Now, 3 months later, while editing a script in 1 of the objects, the duplicates returned. Upon closer examination, it appears that the duplication is intentional, and only appears to be a duplicate when an object like a tabpage is added to a tab control, and the tabpage has no other objects placed on it.
For example, this is from a userobject with a tab control and 3 empty tabpages placed on the tab control, you see what appears to be duplicate type definitions for each tabpage:
forward
global type uo_tab_test from userobject
end type
type tab_1 from tab within uo_tab_test
end type
type tabpage_1 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tabpage_1 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tabpage_2 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tabpage_2 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tabpage_3 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tabpage_3 from userobject within tab_1
end type
type tab_1 from tab within uo_tab_test
tabpage_1 tabpage_1
tabpage_2 tabpage_2
tabpage_3 tabpage_3
end type
end forward
If objects were placed on the pages, their declarations would come between the duplicated declarations and then they would be included in the 2nd of the duplicated types, just as the 3 tabpages appear in the tab_1 type declaration at the bottom.
My question is, since the source control editor allowed the removal of the duplicated type/end type for each without a compilation issue, and the userobject painter didn't complain when opening the object with the duplicates removed, and only added them back after doing an edit and a save of the object, and full builds also don't complain about the removal of the duplicate empty type definition, do we need to go back and add back the ones we removed 3 months ago?
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