| When PowerBuilder 5 came out the Datawindow gained a new way to access
the attributes of the Datawindow object. Previous to PowerBuilder 5 we had to use the
GetItemX commands and Modify and Describe. Most newcomer's to PowerBuilder automatically
use the new dot notation and do not think about the old GetItemX functions. Being and old
timer I still use the GetItemX functions but recently I wondered if a move to the new dot
notation was worth a look. After running a quick test I found out that like jokes the old
ones are the best! From the results below you can see that GetItemX was better in PB5 and
got worse in PB6 while the dot notation was terrible in PB5 it was greatly improved in PB6
although it still cannot touch the GetItemX. I also tested use of SetRedraw but as I
expected it had not bearing on the results. The test was performed using 1,000 rows with
a string, datetime and number as the data values:
| Test |
PB5 Time in milliseconds |
PB6 Time in milliseconds |
| GetItemX using the Column Number |
205 |
316 |
| GetItemX using the Column Name |
262 |
371 |
| Dot Notation using the Column Name |
851 |
1881 |
| Dot Notation using Array Subscript |
2293 |
1075 |
| Dot Notation using a DWO reference and Array
SubScript |
2280 |
1098 |
|