Microsoft Developer

Once you've generated the first GUID for the first dialog item, you might want to just use sequential values from that point on (refer to Figure 1 again).

After the CSLID entry has been created, you need to modify the default string value and create three new ones:

The URL syntax follows the standard for Internet URLs in that the URL can be prefixed with username/password information and suffixed by a "?", followed by any arguments in a name/value combination. Arguments to painters can include "action" (where action can be "new," "inherit," "run," "runonly," and "open"), "path" (indicates the path to the PBL containing the object), and "entry" (indicates the name of the object).

Listing 1 is a portion of a PowerBuilder utility, available in the source code, that will create these registry entries for you.

The results are shown in Figure 6. Note that there does not appear to be any way to control the position of the new icon. Interestingly enough, they're added to the front of the dialog, not at the end, as I would have expected.

Also note that the URLs indicated here will work in the custom toolbar icon dialogs as well. The main advantage of adding items to the New Dialog over the toolbar is that the toolbar doesn't allow you to use icons other than those provided with PowerBuilder.

Creating Custom Wizards
You may not realize it, but a number of the PowerBuilder system DLLs in the Shared/PowerBuilder directory are not actually DLLs. They're PBDs (compiled PowerBuilder libraries) that have simply been renamed. If you rename the extension on a copy of them to PBL and add the PBDs to a target, you can examine the object listing and even open the objects in the PowerBuilder IDE, but you won't be able to view the source for any scripts. In particular, the PBADD90.DLL appears to contain the many items provided with PowerBuilder on the tools tab of the new dialog (migration assistant, DataWindow syntax, profiling tools, PFC extender, etc.). The PBGEN90.DLL file appears to be the PowerBuilder objects used during template target generation. Finally, the PBWIZ90.DLL and PBWZP90.DLL files appear to be the PowerBuilder objects that serve as a basis for many of the wizards that appear with the PowerBuilder IDE.

This illustrates the next method of extending the PowerBuilder IDE. It's possible to create objects within PowerBuilder that can then be used as wizards within the IDE. Once you've created the objects and compiled the library that contains them to a PBD, let the PowerBuilder IDE know about them through a couple of registry entries. First, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Sybase\PowerBuilder\X.0 again, and this time create a subkey called "WizardLibraries." Under that new subkey create new string values for each PBD you want to be able to use the objects from. The name of the string values must be a sequential number, and the value will point to the PBD file.

Now that the objects are available to the PowerBuilder IDE, create a new dialog icon or custom toolbar icon that runs them, using the "wizard" keyword mentioned above. The "wizard" keyword syntax is as follows:

wizard:?entry=<name of window>

where <name of window> is the window you want the PowerBuilder IDE to run when the option is selected (without the brackets).

The source code for this article includes a small utility for creating the WizardLibraries entry for you. Listing 2 provides the most relevant section of that application.

Figure 7 illustrates a custom wizard running from within the PowerBuilder IDE. The sample code for this wizard is also included in the sample code for the article.