Re: Calculating a New Date

I don't understand the benefit of doing this.   Why not just have each
prgoram use the date operations when it needs to convert the dates?  Is
this program really saving you anything?

In our shop we:

  1) When we find an RPG II or RPG III program that needs to work with
      dates this way, we convert it to RPG IV.
  2) When an RPG IV program needs to work with dates, we use the date
      operations directly.  Makes for easier to follow code than having
      to understand what a separate program does, especially since it's
      only 2-3 lines of code.
  3) When a CL program needs to work with dates, we use the CVTDAT
      command.

If you REALLY need to have a utility you can call to simply flip/convert
dates, then make it a service program with different procedures for each
date type.  i.e.

        iso2mdy(), iso2ymd, dmy2iso(), etc.

This makes for a more efficient code, and code that's easier to follow
than having parameters that describe the various date types that you can
pass.

That's my 2 cents, anyway...


On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Bill wrote:

> I've got a program that calculates a new date based upon a number of
> days offset.  Here is a snippet of the code:
>
> . . .
> C     *entry        Plist
> C                   Parm                    indate
> C                   Parm                    dateformat        5
> C                   Parm                    diffdays          4 0
> C                   Parm                    outdate
> C*
> C                   Select
> C*
> C     dateformat    WhenEq    '*MDY'
> C     dateformat    OrEq      '*mdy'
> C     *mdy          Move      inmdy         @date
> C                   AddDur    diffdays:*days@xxxx
> C     *mdy          Move      @date         outmdy
> . . .
>
> I'm enhancing the logic to handle all valid date formats, to allow the
> option specification of an output date format, and will be prototyping
> the parameters.
>
> Does anyone have a sample of a program like this already written?  I'm
> going to end up overhauling this thing and would like to save a lot of
> time if it's already been done.  BTW, I'm at V5R2 and am not against
> free form code.
>