Re: ** Multiple dates/one machine **

[David.X.Kahn@xxxxxxx]

Simon wrote:

> create a routing program for each subsystem that looks up a table to
> determine their time zone offset and set the job date and time
accordingly.

Simon, I'm familiar with the job date which, as you point out, is really
the job start date, but I wasn't aware there was such a thing as a job
time. How would I go about retrieving and changing that?

It would of course be possible to design a multi-time zone application from
scratch to use date/time arithmetic based on the system time and the
QUTCOFFSET system value, but as Ian says he's using a package this is
probably a nonstarter for him.

The software package solution mentioned by Ilena, and alluded to by you,
might well do the job, but as you say they will need to do careful testing
particularly with regard to timestamps and audit trails. There would also
need to be a business decision about whether they really wanted audit trail
data to show local time or system time. Also you have to consider the long
term support for this software, which was essentially a Y2K testing tool,
as new releases of OS/400 appear and its client base dwindles.

> they stuffed it up by using local time as the base and they didn't allow
> job description or user profile overrides to QUTCOFFSET

I couldn't agree more. It's as if IBM never really expected a single AS/400
to serve interactive users in multiple time zones, but even within the US
this must be an issue for many companies. The most realistic solution might
be to encourage the users simply to accept the situation and think in
time-zone mode the way financial traders have to. Maybe some clocks on the
wall set to the times in each location would help.

Dave...

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