How PowerBuilder builds the project
When PowerBuilder builds your application project:
-
If you selected Rebuild: Full,
PowerBuilder regenerates all the objects in the libraries. -
If you selected Prompt for Overwrite, PowerBuilder
displays a message box asking for confirmation before overwriting
the executable file and each dynamic library. -
To create the executable file you specified, PowerBuilder
searches through your target and copies into the executable file
the compiled versions of referenced objects
from the libraries in the target’s library search path
that are not specified as dynamic libraries. For more details, see “How PowerBuilder searches
for objects”. -
PowerBuilder creates a dynamic library for each
of the libraries you specified for the target and maintains a list
of these library files. PowerBuilder maintains the unqualified file
names of the dynamic library files; it does not save the path name.
PowerBuilder does not copy objects that are not referenced
in the application to the executable file, nor does it copy objects
to the executable file from libraries you declared to be dynamic
libraries. These objects are linked to the target at runtime and
are not stored in the executable file.
What happens at runtime
When an object such as a window is referenced in the application, PowerBuilder
first looks in the executable file for the object. If it does not
find it there, it looks in the dynamic library files that are defined
for the target. For example, if you specified that a dynamic library
should be generated from test.pbl, PowerBuilder
looks for test.pbd or test.dll at
runtime. The dynamic library files must be in the search path. If
PowerBuilder cannot find the object in any of the dynamic library
files, it reports a runtime error.