Re: Y2K and six digit date display

[Glenn Ericson <Glenn-Ericson@xxxxxxx>]

James 
technique and  dates by meaning-  sounds fine  with a  phase II after 2000
worries.

I think I misssed something here.
What are all the  conversions from  6 to 8 to Gregorian to Juilian and back
about? How  does that add to the value of the compare etc.? 
Seems  like a lot of work for<??> gain/validation.   I know standard date
routines/APIs  but here are always those machine cycles.

Glenn
At 07:23 PM 12/16/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Glenn,
>
>I hear you,  when we first started on this issue the question came up as
to date
>data entry and my question was, for how long do you want users keying in
an entry
>two digits? (19xx or 20xx)  For some shops that adds up to a LOT of
keystrokes!
>
>What it boiled down to was as long as the underlying file was able to keep
dates
>properly we would leave the display/print alone.  Otherwise we would be
>revisiting the whole display/print issue is a couple of years when century
>turnover no longer became an issue.   Talk about job security ;-)
>
>We sat down and looked at the purpose of certain dates.  Birth date ...
>definitely 8 digits.  Hire date .... ditto, Invoice date, well a window
technique
>was good enough.  (BTW we store dates since 1991 as 7,0P  as cyymmdd ...
before
>ILE date data types)  Due date ... can't be before invoice date.  So for
>display/print purposes it depended on the nature of the date.  Since we
stored
>all dates as 7,0P we could add 1900 to the cyy and show 8 digit dates where
>appropriate (export to PC via query, etc.) but to fill the standard 80/20
rule
>... 80% of the time a 6 digit display/print was just fine.
>
>Where we changed our date validation routines is that we no longer looked
at year
>00 being invalid/ommitted.  Using a window technique we would take a 6 digit
>entered date, convert it to 8 digits, convert that to julian, convert the
julian
>back to gregorian and if the result matched the entered date it was valid.
 Then
>we might look for appropriateness, like could someone issue us an invoice
dated
>beyond today's date? Could an entry be made dated outside of a 120 day
window?
>(Auditor time frame ... or stops erroneous omissions until Sept. 1999)
Could an
>entry be made to a closed accounting period? Etc.
>
>Then there are the 20% cases where an 8 digit display/print date may very
well be
>appropriate, if for no other reason then to give a warm and fuzzy feeling
until
>enough years go by that it just takes up too much landscape.  Then the job
>security issues appears again ;-)
>
>James W. Kilgore
>email@James-W-Kilgore.com
>
>Glenn Ericson wrote:
>
>> <<snip<
>>
>> I know  a lot of words to tell you that  8 digits  is NOT  always the  best
>> solution, NOT always accepted easily, nor implemented  without infringing
>> on real estate  changes.
>
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Seasons Greetings

Glenn
___________________________________________________
Glenn Ericson,          Phoenix Consulting                      
P O Box 701164   East Elmhurst NY 11370-3164 USA                            
Phone 718 898 9805       Fax 718 446 1150
AS/400 & Year 2000- - Solutions Specialists
 ©  copyright 1998,  all rights reserved
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