A PowerBuilder Color Function
While I was working on my PowerBuilder Color Chart , I started thinking about how we use color values in PB datawindow expressions. If you wanted to give every other row in a datawindow a gray background, you might put something like this in the detail band's background expression: if (mod(getrow(), 2) = 0, 16777215, 8421504)) But you'd have to know that 16777215 represents white and 8421504 is the number for gray. A lot of developers take the next step and use the RGB function: if (mod(getrow(), 2) = 0, RGB(255, 255, 255), RGB(128, 128, 128)) Here you specify the Red, Green and Blue values for the color you want and the RGB function returns the proper number. It's still not very easy to tell at a glance what the color is, but it's certainly easier than the first expression. I wanted an easier way to specify a color. So I created a new function, f_color. You pass it one of the PowerBuilder color names and it will return the proper number. For example, our alternate row
