Plastic SCM & PowerBuilder installation guide

This post describes how to configure PowerBuilder environment to use Plastic SCM as the source code control provider. It assumes the Plastic SCM SCC Plug-in is installed and that your client machine can communicate with the Plastic SCM server.

From Plastic SCM side
You have to change the Plastic SCM preferences before start working with PowerBuilder. You must go to Plastic preferences, then click in the "Other options" tab, and enable the option:

Compare file contents instead of using timestamp for 'quick diff'.

From PowerBuilder side

In order to bind a PowerBuilder workspace with a Plastic SCM one, you must rigth click on the PowerBuilder workspace and then on properties menu option. Then, select the tab "Source control" and you will see a screen like the following one. Select Plastic PLUGIN as Source Control System.

Also you must enable the following options:

Perform diff on status update
Supress prompts to overwrite read-only files

Performance considerations

By default PowerBuilder calls to the SCC provider with file packages. The default value is 25, so if you want to checkin 100 files, PowerBuilder will call the SCC provider 4 times, and will create 4 different changesets.

This is a behavior that we want to avoid, due to our checkin operation being atomic. This value can be changed in the PowerBuilder configuration file (pb.ini), that is placed in the PowerBuilder root installation folder, by default:

c:\Program Files\Sybase\PowerBuilder\pb.ini

You must add the following parameter in the Library section:

SccMaxArraySize=X, being X the number of files per SCC call. A good value could be 5000.


Now Plastic SCM and PowerBuilder are configured to start working. You can take a look at the PowerBuilder documentation about SCC tasks here