Incremental Build Processing

When you save recently edited code, the PowerBuilder IDE invokes the PowerScript compiler to get information for updating the System Tree and the property sheet.

There are basically three kinds of changes that the compiler handles:

Implementation changes, such as modifications to a function body or to the properties of a class.
Interface changes, such as the removal of a function or the modification of a function prototype.
Data changes, including edits made to a DataWindow, Query, or Pipeline object.

The IDE collects the information that has changed, performs a full or incremental PowerScript rebuild, and passes the necessary information to the pb2cs .NET translator. If the PowerScript compiler reports any errors the IDE does not invoke the .NET translator.

An interface change that is successfully compiled by the PowerScript compiler and then passed to pb2cs can also affect code in classes that are compiled in a different .NET module of the same target. In this case, if you rebuild the project using the incremental rebuild process, the .NET runtime throws an exception when you try to run the application.

PowerBuilder catches and translates .NET runtime exceptions to error messages describing the exception source. Before redeploying the application, you can correct this type of error by changing the PowerScript code based on the contents of the error message or by performing a full rebuild. If there are many places in other .NET modules affected by the interface change, it is best to do a full rebuild.

If you only make data changes to DataWindow objects before an incremental rebuild, the .NET rebuild process is skipped entirely and only application PBD files are redeployed.