Re: RPG IV Date Question

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002 THarteau@felkerbrothers.com wrote:
>
>      This may sound like a silly question, but how do you get today's date
> into a date field? I can do almost anything in RPG 400 or 3, but I'm still
> learning RPG 4. In the past I have moved UDATE to a 6.0 field, added that
> and 20000000 to an 8 digit field, then moved that to the date field. There
> has got to be an more elegant way to do this, isn't there? Thanks!
>

Hi.

    First of all, even in RPG/400 I wouldn't do it this way!  You
don't want the leading "20" to be hardcoded...  In RPG/400, I would
use *DATE instead of UDATE, because it fills in all 8 digits.

The same exact method is available in RPG IV.  You can move *DATE or
UDATE in exactly the same way.

Likewise, if you didn't want the job date  (which is what UDATE and *DATE
give you -- the date the user signed on or the job was submitted) then
you would use the TIME op-code in RPG/400.   The same TIME op-code is
available in RPG IV, and you use it the same way.

RPG IV also has other ways of doing things that RPG III did not.   You
can use date-type fields, and initialize them from UDATE or TIME.  You
can also have the system initialize the date fields for you at start-up.

      ** Example:   Populating a numeric var with UDATE
     C                   move      UDATE         my_date           6 0

      ** Example:   Populating a numeric var with *DATE
     C                   move      *DATE         my_date           8 0

      ** Example:   Populating a numeric date with TIME
     C                   TIME                    temp             14 0
     c                   move      temp          my_date           8 0

      ** Example:   Populating a date field with UDATE
     D my_date         S               D
     C     *jobrun       move      UDATE         my_date

      ** Example:   Populating a date field with TIME
     D my_date         S               D
     C                   time                    my_date

      ** Example:   Populating a date field at program initialization
      **            (using system clock)
     D my_date         S               D   inz(*SYS)

      ** Example:   Populating a date field at program initialization
      **            (using job date)
     D my_date         S               D   inz(*JOB)