Powerbuilder binary files .pbl represents Powerbuilder libraries and can only be read by the Powerbuilder IDE. For a versioned Powerbuilder project, only sources code are up to date(file extension .sru,srf,srd,srw .etc.), but pbl are not. As consequence, when you run just cloned or checkedout project, an outdated version is run.
One need to refresh the project to update library files .pbl. This can be done with the Powerbuilder IDE or from the command-line using Orcascript command-line tool provided by Powerbuilder.
Here I present a way to refresh pbl using command-line. This can be used as a post-commit script or simply CI build step( a step before unit tests running).
Regenerating binary files pbl for version controlling in Powerbuilder is not obvious and quite tricky.
The first thing to know is that when you are versioning a Powerbuilder project, the IDE PB17 creates a folder named ws_objects where it puts all the source grouped in a directory corresponding to the library that the source belongs to.
For each of these library folders, a file libraryName.pbg. A libraryName.pbg contains the list of Powerbuilder objects (classes in java world) that a library contains.
By default libraryName.pbg files are saved with utf-8 bom encoding.
For the PBL regenerating to work,
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✅ you need to first copy .pbg files from ws_objects\libraryName to ws_objects;
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✅ override these libraryName.pbg files by correcting source files path. Because by default, it suppose that pbg files and sources files are in the same directory;
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✅ you need to change libraryName.pbg file encoding from utf-8 bom to utf-8. Finally, you should edit the following script and run it
start session
scc debug true
scc set connect property logfile "path_to_log_file.log"
scc connect offline
scc set target "path_to_target_file.pbt" importonly
scc refresh target 3pass
scc close
end session
Powerbuilder 19 R3 is suppose to fix all these issues. Find the officiel description 👉 here