Defining display formats

Display formats are represented through masks, where certain characters have special significance. PowerBuilder supports four kinds of display formats, each using different mask characters:

Numbers
Strings
Dates
Times

For example, in a string format mask, each @ represents a character in the string and all other characters represent themselves. You can use the following mask to display phone numbers:

(@@@) @@@-@@@@

Combining formats

You can include different types of display format masks in a single format. Use a space to separate the masks. For example, the following format section includes a date and time format:

mmmm/dd/yyyy h:mm

Using sections

Each type of display format can have multiple sections, with each section corresponding to a form of the number, string, date, or time. Only one section is required; additional sections are optional and should be separated with semicolons (;). You cannot use sections in edit masks. Semicolons can be used only in display formats.

The following format specifies different displays for positive and negative numbers—negative numbers are displayed in parentheses:

$#,##0;($#,##0)

Using keywords

Enclose display format keywords in square brackets. For example, you can use the keyword [General] when you want PowerBuilder to determine the appropriate format for a number.

Using colors

You can define a color for each display format section by specifying a color keyword before the format. The color keyword is the name of the color, or a number that represents the color, enclosed in square brackets: [RED] or [255]. The number is usually used only when a color is required that is not provided by name. The named color keywords are:

[BLACK]
[BLUE]
[CYAN]
[GREEN]
[MAGENTA]
[RED]
[WHITE]
[YELLOW]

The formula for combining primary color values into a number is:

256*256*blue + 256*green + red=number

where the amount of each primary color is specified as a value from 0 to 255. For example, to specify cyan, substitute 255 for blue, 255 for green, and 0 for red. The result is 16776960.

If you want to add text to a numeric display format and use a color attribute, you must include the escape character (\) before each literal in the mask. For example:

[red]\D\e\p\t\: ###

Table 22-1 lists the blue, green, and red values you can use in the formula to create other colors.

**Table 22-1: Numeric values used to create colors**
Blue	Green	Red	Number	Color
0	0	255	255	Red
0	255	0	65280	Green
0	128	0	32768	Dark green
255	0	0	16711680	Blue
0	255	255	65535	Yellow
0	128	128	32896	Brown
255	255	0	16776960	Cyan
192	192	192	12632256	Light gray

Using special characters

To include a character in a mask that has special meaning in a display format, such as [, precede the character with a backslash (\). For example, to display a single quotation mark, enter \'.

Setting display formats at runtime

In scripts, you can use GetFormat to get the current format for a column and SetFormat to change the format for a column at runtime.