Q&A
Fragen und Antworten vom PBUGG Meeting 2023
Here are some enhancement requests/technical concerns raised during our European seminars.
They asked to be able to hide database passwords from developers in PowerScript.
[Appeon] We will consider this enhancement request. However, we cannot comment about feasibility or likelihood of this. If in future we plan to do this, we will list it on the Appeon product roadmap page: https://www.appeon.com/developers/roadmap
They asked if AutoComplete DDDW/DDLB could be used to force a value from the list.
[Appeon] We will consider this enhancement request. While we cannot make any guarantees, our best guess is it would be supported in PB 2025.
They asked for ability to import data from fillable forms in a PDF.
[Appeon] We will consider this enhancement request. However, we cannot comment about feasibility or likelihood of this. If in future we plan to do this, we will list it on the Appeon product roadmap page: https://www.appeon.com/developers/roadmap
They asked for the ability to embed a PDF as watermark in another PDF.
[Appeon] The third-party library we use for PDF does not support this. The workaround is to convert the PDF into an image and supply the image file as the watermark.
They asked if it was possible to drag and drop from Outlook to PowerBuilder.
[Appeon] This is not natively supported in PowerBuilder and we have no plans to support this. Bruce found an add in for Outlook that enables Outlook to support the drag file operation (https://www.dragdrop.com/). Anvil of Time has an article that shows how to accept the drag file (https://anvil-of-time.com/powerbuilder/powerbuilder-dragging-files-onto-the-application/).
They asked if it was possible to open an object and a dependent objects at the same time with new compiler.
[Appeon] We will consider this enhancement request. However, we cannot comment about feasibility or likelihood of this. If in future we plan to do this, we will list it on the Appeon product roadmap page: https://www.appeon.com/developers/roadmap
They expressed concern about the number of files that would need to be deployed with the new compiler in PB 2025.
[Appeon] There was mistake made by Armeen during the presentation. The individual -code files is only at design time on the developer’s machine. When the app is packaged for deployment to end users, the deployment process still generates traditional .EXE + .PBDs. So compared to before, there is no change in # of files that need to be deployed to the end user’s machine.
They were looking for some ability to save a DataWindow as Excel with formatting. This was on the roadmap at some point and then removed.
[Appeon] Correct, this has been removed from the roadmap and we do not have plans to do this in the foreseeable future. The reasons are explained in this post: https://community.appeon.com/index.php/qna/q-a/datawindow-excel?limitstart=0#reply-42332
They were asking about a 64 bit version of ORCA.
[Appeon] We will consider this enhancement request together with 64-bit version of the IDE. However, we cannot comment about feasibility or likelihood of this. If in future we plan to do this, we will list it on the Appeon product roadmap page: https://www.appeon.com/developers/roadmap
They indicated they were having problems using PostgreSQL stored procedures in the database as RPCFUNC declarations on the transaction object.
[Appeon] There are some limitations on PostgreSQL support. Bruce has covered some of the caveats in this article covering the feature (https://www.brucearmstrong.org/2018/02/powerbuilder-2017-r2-new-feature.html). There’s also a thread in the forums on some of the limitations: https://community.appeon.com/index.php/qna/q-a/calling-a-postgres-procedure
We will consider this enhancement request. However, we cannot comment about feasibility or likelihood of this. If in future we plan to do this, we will list it on the Appeon product roadmap page: https://www.appeon.com/developers/roadmap
They indicated that when they used Tabbed MDI that child windows were treated as sheets and opened at tabs.
[Appeon] To the best of our knowledge this problem should not exist and it could be a bug. Please open a support ticket: https://www.appeon.com/standardsupport/newbug