Re: SQL list *OUTFILE of DSPOBJD by date

On 12 Apr 2013 08:42, Stone, Joel wrote:

It seems that the consensus is to NOT convert to a date format,
rather leave it as MM/DD/YY.

That doesn't make sense to me as I am DSPOBJD of all *QRYDFN's
in a lib and then displaying the output by descending order of
Create-date or Last-Used-Date.

Ugh! No mention was made of any other date fields. The Last Used Date may be blanks :-( That is definitely not going to be compatible with casting to DATE!

The old 1999 stuff will appear at the top of the list - which is
not what is desired.

Of course a sorting by blanks for /not used/ is probably acceptable. Or the NULL value for any blank date.

Here is the code I came up with. I am thinking that I will change
to ISO date as several have suggested so the JOB date format
doesn't come into play.

FWiW the *USA date format is, as I recall, /easier/ to convert from MMDDYY, because the digits are already in the correct order.

If using the other non-displayed /date-like/ MMDDYY values, because the others can have /blank dates/ I would recommend just creating a UDF. I have two; one for the date-like and time-like values, that handles blanks. I may or may not have the code for leap adjust issues with 29-Feb. Of course a simple NULLIF(mmddyy_field, '') is simple enough to cause the whole expression to yield the NULL value for a blank date. The UDF however would also yield the NULL value for garbage inputs; e.g. if there was a blank for the ODxCEN but not the ODxDAT column.