Is there a way to export powerbuilder application to text?

Question

I want to start controlling our inhouse applicatoin using Git.

And I thougth that if I can export all the application to text (not exporting object by object) and then using Git in them.

And of course I will need a method to import this text files into powerbuilder if I need to make a merge or revert some changes.

Another solution could be and MSCC provider for git. but I think it would be difficult to find because the interface is not publicly available.

Answer 1

Lots of tools do it, including mine, but most, including mine, use the PowerScript LibraryExport() function, which will trash the binary portion of the OLE objects. The only tool I know of that does exporting correctly, including OLE binaries, is PowerGen, however if you're picking GIT for it's price, you most likely won't like PowerGen. (There's a ton of reasons to want PowerGen in your toolbelt, BTW. There are scrapes that only PowerGen can get you out of.)

As I think you were alluding to, if you pick a source control tool that supports Microsoft's SCC API interface, then you don't have to worry about all this; you'll just be able to have PowerBuilder interface directly with the source control tool. I used PB with CVS years ago, but I'm afraid I don't recall which extra components I had to put into place and how. One of Sybase's NNTP newsgroups is devoted to PB and source control, and if they haven't already addressed the issue of free source control, I bet they'd have interesting comments.

Answer 2

You can use ORCA to export and import whatever you like. ORCA is an interface to the PB IDE, which can be used in two ways: from within a C++ program, or as a script (called, well, OrcaScript). Using ORCA you should have no problem listing all objects in a PBL, exporting them, doing whatever work you wish and then importing them back. Using it as an intermediate layer between PB and GIT might require some work, though.

Answer 3

There is a beta out now of pb.net, it allows for conversion of existing projects to wpf/text based (unicode) projects i.e. each object becomes a text file

http://response.sybase.com/forms/WW09JULPB12beta1

using the compiler, you can export your projects from .pbl to text by doing:

pb2cs.exe /t:wpfmigration /pbt:"... myproj.pbt" /o:"some output dir"

In pb.net (pb12), all files are just text files