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Yet another Date question

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    Yet another Date question

    I am new to Alpha, but have worked in the business basic world (ProvideX, Basis, etc) for 20+ years. I have some ISAM files that I want to import into a table. I created the table, which includes a multikey index and created a tab delimited text file from my legacy data. So far, so good. One of the fields in the key is a date in the form YYYYMMDD. I use that form all the time in sort keys. Alpha doesn't like that format of a Date. When I do an import, with my table element set as DATE, Alpha just strips it out and the table has no dates! What does Alpha want in terms of a date? Do I have to make the element into a Character and then play with the formatting? In fact, I have done just that. Only problem now is that in the form that I created to display the records, I have no clue as to how to simply format the date. I have been all over the Help File and have read a ton of posts here relating to date issues, but my questions don't seem to be answered anywhere.. at least not within the last 3-4 months that I searched in. I know you old time db programmers are probably laughing your butts off, but I've wasted a ton of time on something that should be elementary. Do you have to enter in code somewhere to pull this off? How do you tell Alpha that YYYYMMDD is a valid Date format? I did some Access stuff a couple of years ago and didn't have near this much grief. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Joe
    Louisville, Kentucky

    #2
    Alpha uses a MM/DD/YYYY format

    easiest way might be to have 2 fields

    your information comming into a character defined field. YYYYMMDD

    then a field to hold the converted date

    newdate = ctod(substr(yourfield,5,2)+"/"+substr(yourfield,7,2+"/"+substr(yourfield,1,4)

    charlie Crimmel

    Comment


      #3
      This situation has bothered me before, too. I've just now begun a new topic in the Features Wishlist Forum to propose the addition of a new function to convert YYYYMMDD strings into Dates. -- tom

      Comment


        #4
        Thanks Charlie. Good info, but I have no clue where to put what you posted... so I will keep digging in the help files.

        Tom, seriously, if I had known about this date issue, I doubt I would have purchased the product. It is so fundamental that I can't imagine having something that maintains data, yet is ignoring a sortable date field in the table structure. Maybe I'm missing something, but so many people have posted issues with dates when doing importing and even just using the YYYYMMDD format as a DATE field that Alpha seems to have dropped the ball here.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by golferman53
          .............I doubt I would have purchased the product. It is so fundamental that I can't imagine having something that maintains data, yet is ignoring a sortable date field in the table structure. ...............
          Hello Joe,

          I don't think it is that serious ........... but then I'm an long time alphaHolic. I don't think this is a deal, but certainly other environments may handle this more intuitively, but it is really not problem in Alpha once you get used to how things are done ( IMHO :-). We use cdate to sort all the time, and Alpha uses it internally in indexes etc.. For the most part it is transparent .............. again at least from a long time Alpha users perspective.

          During the import you can use an expression to convert to an DBF date format, or use charlie's suggestion of importing to a character field and then having a calc field that converts the imported string to a DBF date.

          Here is a simple user defined function that you can paste into the function editor and you'll have a function to do this:

          Code:
          FUNCTION cDateToDate AS D (vCdate AS C )
          	cDateToDate = eval("{"+substr(vCdate,5,2)+"/"+substr(vCdate,7,2)+"/"+substr(vCdate,1,4)+"}")
          END FUNCTION
          Good luck and welcome to the Alpha community.

          Jim
          Last edited by Jim Chapman; 11-02-2005, 11:16 PM.

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