The PowerBuilder Object Tagger (PBOT) tags objects so that you can search for them by name within the PowerBuilder IDE. This tool operates on exported text object files, and so, is intended to be used with a target under source control.
To learn how to put a PowerBuilder project under SVN source control, see the tutorial at http://bigsnowball.com/content/put-powerbuilder-project-under-svn-source-control.
The tagging done by PBOT is simple text manipulation that could be done far more efficiently by Perl or shell scripts. However, since PowerBuilder is predominantly used in a Microsoft Windows environment where Perl and shell are rare, it seemed best to implement using PowerBuilder itself. There is no executable version since the tool is only useful for developers who already have PowerBuilder anyway.
PBOT is intended to be used by PowerBuilder developers working in Microsoft Windows.
Although PowerBuilder does provide a way to search your libraries for strings in source code, as of version 11.5 there still is no way to locate an object. You cannot search for an object by name. This means you have tojust know where an object is. In a typical project with several libraries, each with some 50 to 100 objects, just knowing becomes a full-time job. A significant portion of a developer's time is wasted just looking for things.
There are third-party tools that allow you to search for objects within a library (e.g. PBLPeeper), However, they are all external to the PowerBuilder IDE. The goal of this project is to permit you to locate an object from within PowerBuilder and thereby recover what would otherwise be time lost.
In PBOT, select the workingcopy folder that contains the exported PowerBuilder source files you want to tag. Click Scan to see which files need to be tagged. Click Tag to tag them. Once tagged, commit your changes using TortoiseSVN and refresh the SCC status of your project in PowerBuilder. This will allow PowerBuilder to update your libraries with the changes you made externally.
Once tagged, you can search for an object in PowerBuilder by searching for the string name:object_name. For example, to locate the w_frame window, search your target for
name:w_frame
There are no sourceforge installation files for this project because you should get it using SVN checkout.
Follow the instructions at http://bigsnowball.com/content/practice-checking-out-powerbuilder-object-tagger to check out the PowerBuilder Object Tagger. If you are already comfortable checking out a PowerBuilder project from source files in an SVN repository, the Repository URL is https://pbotagger.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pbotagger.
Since the PBOT modifies your PowerBuilder source code, something could go wrong which would break your PowerBuilder project. In such an event, use SVN revert to recover.