Re: COBOL400-L Digest, Vol 14, Issue 41

On Sep 14, 2016, at 1:50 PM, Stone, Joel <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks Michael - I was doing a two-step process also. Just curious if there is a better way.

It seems very odd that iseries COBOL ILE introduced the FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE as an alpha result - and not as a date or timestamp field.

All the other date functions work with date data types.

Plus, COBOL already had a method to get the current date/time as an alpha field.

Joel


-----Original Message-----
From: COBOL400-L [mailto:cobol400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2016 12:52 PM
To: cobol400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [COBOL400-L] COBOL400-L Digest, Vol 14, Issue 41

"COBOL400-L" <cobol400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 09/14/2016
01:00:02 PM:

----- Message from "Stone, Joel" <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> on Tue, 13
Sep 2016 18:22:36 +0000 -----

To:

"'COBOL Programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)'" <cobol400-
l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject:

[COBOL400-L] COBOL: getting the current date into am *ISO db field

ILE Cobol v7r1

Trying to learn all about date data types and cobol. I can see why
many use the old YYYYMMDD pic x(8) in their db fields!!

Is it possible to acquire the current date AND move it into a db
field in one step? It doesn't seem to be possible; am I missing

something?

DTDUE-DT is defined as *ISO in the db (is there a better choice?)



Using *DATETIME and *DATE as compiler options, the COBOL compiler
data definition sees it as:

06 DTDUE-DT FORMAT DATE '@Y-%m-%d'.
DUE DT
(Date field)



MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE to DTDUE-DT

Seems to fail; ie it refuses to acknowledge the separators.

Executing the statement at noon today, DTDUE-DT is set to 2016090312

Where the ending "12" is the hours.

I have tried

MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE ('@Y-%m-%d) to DTDUE-DT

And also

MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE to DTDUE-DT ('@Y-%m-%d)

But those don't get past the editor :(


Shouldn't COBOL be smart enough to add the date separators "-" if
the target field is defined with them??

Thanks in advance!

Here's the long answer:

The tricky thing is FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE does not produce a date-field
value. It also doesn't support any format codes. It is a 21 character
alphanumeric value with the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSShh+nnmm. (That's my
format coding, I think first part is obvious Year, month, etc. The latter
parts are:
hh - hundredths of a second
+ - UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) + = plus or - = minus
nn - Hours plus or minus UTC/GMT
mm - Additional minutes plus or minus UTC/GMT

------------------

The short answer is you need to do two steps to get it to a date field
with any format other than '@Y%M%D' OR '%Y%M%D'.

Working-storage section.

01 Today format date '@Y%M%D'.

Procedure Division.

move function current-date to Today.

------------------

Then you can move today to any other format date field. My first executed
paragraph in COBOL is a set of initializations. I set up the current date
in a date field named 'Today' and then initialize any other values needed.
It would be nice if there was a function that returned today's date as
date value (and the same for time and timestamp). But that's not provided.

Michael Quigley
Computer Services
The Way International
www.TheWay.org
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