Date Formats in PH819C4

[Deskin, Bob]

This is actually unchanged from older versions of PowerHouse. It's just that
it becomes more obvious now that we have to deal with the century. Basically
PowerHouse needs to know what digits belong to which piece of the date. Now
we know that there are 2 digits each in the month and day, but we don't know
whether the year is 2 digits or 4 digits. So when you have a format of
ddmmyyyy, we assume the first 2 digits are the day, the next 2 are the month
and anything left over is the year (with or without the century because
PowerHouse doesn't force the century unless you say FORCE CENTURY). However,
with a format of yyyymmdd, or a format of yymmdd with the ALLOW CENTURY
option, and an entry of 000101, we don't assume that the first 2 digits are
the year. We did discuss making lots of assumptions, but decided not to
because of data validation. Assumptions can let users enter invalid data. We
decided that with the century change, we wouldn't make any assumptions. Keep
in mind that all PowerHouse needs is the first separator - 00/0101. Also
note that if you wanted to drop the leading zeros, you'd need separators as
well - 00/1/1.

Bob Deskin              
Senior Product Advisor, Application Development Tools, Cognos Inc.
bob.deskin@cognos.com (613) 738-1338 ext 4205 FAX: (613) 228-3149
3755 Riverside Drive P.O. Box 9707 Stn. T, Ottawa ON K1G 4K9 CANADA


> ----------
> From: 	Neil Harvey[SMTP:neil@nha.co.za]
> Sent: 	June 8, 1999 5:08 AM
> To: 	powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
> Subject: 	Date Formats in PH819C4
> 
> Greetings
> 
> We are busy converting our clients from 729 to 819 on HP3000 Platform.
> Some of these clients like the dates displayed as yyyy/mm/dd or with
> nullsep
> yyyymmdd.
> Others prefer dd/mm/yyyy, or with nullsep ddmmyyyy. But both want to enter
> the date with or without the century.
> 
> This is pretty easy to achieve, and on the ddmmyyyy (or dd/mm/yyyy) format
> we can enter the dates as 01/01/00 and get a display of 01/01/2000, but
> this
> does not work with the yyyy/mm/dd format. Here we are forced to enter the
> century, UNLESS we enter the date as yy/mm/dd i.e. with the slashes.
> 
> Is this a bug? or a feature :)
> 
> regards
> 
> Neil
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