Victor A Reinhart

Does your shipping department have these problems? Extra charges due to incorrect addresses? Difficulty tracking packages? How about duplicateentries? If your shipping department is really ancient, you may even have rolls of pre-printed UPS shipping labels. Here’s how you can seamlessly integrate your printing function using PowerBuilder. You could buy a third-party product, and that works okay, but these are often licensed per user and must be renewed yearly. They often have their own database, so it’s quite a bit of work to integrate it with your database. Finally, you have to install the package on every desktop where you’ll ship. There is another way. UPS offers a totally free solution where you directly access their Web Service using XML. All data is secured via https. There’s no software to install, no expiration date, and no proprietary... (more)

An Electronic File Cabinet in PowerBuilder

Even the best physical filing systems have drawbacks: the cost of storage space, the need to pay rent for records that have to be kept off-site, the time it takes to locate and refile documents, and, of course, the time wasted finding lost or misfiled documents. You might even have a designated "librarian" who is the only person allowed to file documents. If you store microfilm, it becomes even more cumbersome, since special equipment is needed to view and print copies, and searching a roll of microfilm is slow and tedious. We had to find a better way. The vision was to totally ... (more)

Building a Scoreboard in PowerBuilder

My favorite sport is artistic roller skating, where I act as the tabulator. It's a wonderful sport, a bit like ice skating, except that most events are skated on quad skates (four wheels in a rectangular layout). We do freestyle (with jumps and spins), figure skating (on the circles), and dance. A few of us do inline skating, too. We had a tabulating program: a Visual Basic 3 application. It did its job, but the score sheets which it printed had only the skaters' numbers, not their names. Data was kept in flat files. Skaters and their parents would crowd around the score sheets ... (more)