Re: Passing a Null Date to a Procedure

I have no disagreement here, I wish we were using 0001-01-01 and I will
argue that that is a reason to stop using them, but since we have already
started making the move I doubt I will win the discussion.

Worst case, someone says heck with it, let's go back to 8 digit numeric
dates......yuck!





From: Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "RPG programming on the IBM i / System i" <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 01/04/2010 09:51 AM
Subject: Re: Passing a Null Date to a Procedure
Sent by: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



Doug.

I'm on two minds on this. On one hand, given RPG's lack of support
for nullable variables, using a fixed '0001-01-01' can make things
easier.

On the other hand, if you're dealing with the data outside of RPG,
then using an actual NULL'able field in the DB makes life easier. For
example, you want to some derivative of the data into Excel. With
NULL date fields you're ok, with fields containing '0001-01-01' you'll
have problems. Sure you can put a case in there to convert
'0001-01-01' to NULL but it still gets to be a PITA.

Charles


On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Doug Palme <DPalme@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I argued for the 0001-01-01 date for null capable dates or when we need

a

date to be "null", it was a combination of management and the

programmatic

staff that made the decision as a group and as you can see, I lost :)





From: David FOXWELL <David.FOXWELL@xxxxxxxxx>
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 01/04/2010 02:57 AM
Subject: RE: Passing a Null Date to a Procedure
Sent by: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



Happy new year all,

We pass a lot of dates to procedures and always need to know if the

value

is null.

Actually, we have no null capable date fields in our db. We record the
value 0001-01-01 to represent a null date. All our programs have the
constant gNULL_DATE from a copybook and the parameter would be compared
with that.

I always wondered why we never used real null values and didn't realise
that this would be an issue or that RPG did not have full null support.

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