RE: To Date or Not to Date... that is the question

John,

Guess again....

"Date, Time, and Timestamp Fields
Date, time, and timestamp fields are brought into your program only if you specify the *DATETIME
option of the CRTCBLPGM CVTOPT parameter, or the DATETIME option of the PROCESS statement. Without one
of these options, these fields become FILLER items.

Date, time, and timestamp fields are brought in as fixed-length character fields. Your program can
perform any valid character operations on them."

That is the same method OPM RPG uses.

I'll assume that ILE COBOL handle date data types natively just like ILE RPG.

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of John Arnold (MFS)
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 3:04 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: To Date or Not to Date... that is the question

The Date format is not supported in COBOL400.
If you need to use a file in both RPG and COBOL apps, the decimal 8 is
necessary.


John Arnold
(301) 354-2939


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 2:54 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: To Date or Not to Date... that is the question

I go back and forth on this internally and decided to ask the experts.
Without starting another political battle (like that won't happen), when
defining a date field, is it better to define it as a date or as a
decimal 8?

What I see is:

Benefits to date:
* SQL selections on date are simple
* can easily use data BIFS

Benefits to decimal 8:
* Can have a "zero" date, a date typed field needs to be 0001-01-01
* date BIFS a bit harder to use (but not much)

What is your preference and why?

--
Mike Wills
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikewills
Blog - http://mikewills.name
Podcasts - http://podcastmike.com
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