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New Blog Posts: Merging Reports - Part 1 and Part 2

Auto-Search Date Formatting

edited October 2002 in End User
RB7/D6/daAsta/SQLA5

Using an End User app a report has an auto-search date field. The
user who created it has regional short date settings of yyyy-mm-dd and
another who runs it has yyyy/mm/dd.

The TdaCriteria stores it as yyyy-mm-dd but when the second user tries
to preview they don't get the stored value they get the current
datetime (I believe because the ppStrToDateTime is throwing an
EConvertError).

Is there something I need to set to accommodate varying workstation
regional settings?

Thanks,

Rick Matthews
Dartek Systems Inc.

Comments

  • edited October 2002
    We will look into saving the value down in date time format instead of as a
    string, since it saves it using the regional settings of the machine that it
    was created on. There is no ability in RB to convert between local
    settings. This will be an enhancement to allow you to load the search
    criteria no matter what the regional settings are for the format of any date
    search criteria saved in a report.


    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors

  • edited October 2002
    Thanks Jim.

    Would this enhancement be in a point release for rb7? Could you
    estimate when it might be available (1 month, 3 months etc.)? I have
    to decide if I can wait for it in the product. If I need it earlier
    could you indicate the modules/methods I should update myself?

    Thanks,

  • edited October 2002
    The change is going to be that the TdaCriteria.Value needs to be saved down
    as a double for date time formats, but that won't work as a quick fix
    because there are other types of criteria that the value could be. The
    criteria value is a string because the criteria value is saved down as a
    string even for the other criteria values. For example, save down a report
    template to ascii format which has a dataview with search criteria on a
    numeric field. You'll see that it saves the criteria object's Value property
    down in string format. The problem is that everything is saved down in
    string format and then converted when it is time to use the search criteria.
    There isn't a quick fix, as there are conversion issues to be addressed for
    the current templates that are in use right now. We can't really give a
    valid estimate for when this might get enhanced. There are other
    enhancements we need to make in RB as well. It depends on how long those
    take as we work our way through the queue of features to add.


    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors

  • edited October 2002
    OK. Thanks for the quick response.

    Cheers,

  • edited October 2002
    JIm,

    I looked a bit more carefully and in the saved template the double is
    being saved - although the value property is the string date.

    I got a little lost in following the loading procedure but I think the
    numericvalues are re-created from the value property on load and then
    the value is updated from the new numerics (TdaCriteria.Loaded)? Is
    there any way in TdaCriteria.Loaded to get the TdaNumericValue objects
    and use them directly to set FValue - or do I need a parallel property
    FNValue which could be a comma separated string of double values?

    For instance in a sample template I have:

    object daCriteria3: TdaCriteria
    ChildType = 7
    Level = 0
    Operator = dacoBetween
    Value = '1800/12/30,1899/12/31'
    object TdaField
    Alias = 'TDate'
    AutoSearch = True
    DataType = dtDateTime
    DisplayWidth = 10
    FieldAlias = 'TDate'
    FieldLength = 10
    FieldName = 'TDate'
    SQLFieldName = 'TDate'
    TableAlias = 'Test)'
    TableName = 'Test'
    TableSQLAlias = 'Test'
    end
    object TdaNumericValue
    Value = -36159
    end
    object TdaNumericValue
    Value = 1
    end
    end

    Thanks,

  • edited October 2002
    The numeric value does have the published Value property so it is streaming
    that down. We'll have to research this further to see why it is failing as
    it should be able to take the numeric values and convert them using the
    regional settings for the short date format.

    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors

This discussion has been closed.