RE: Getting a Handle on RPG’s Open Access

Interesting, and kind of confusing to me. First of all, I don't recommend the
prepend-a-single-quote approach, because then it introduces a character
(the single-quote) which isn't part of the data. If this is acceptable to the
recipient, fine, but it just doesn't "feel right" to me.

I agree, but it was just fine with the users, and so I stopped looking for a better way.

The date column may have been there as a numeric value without the hyphens, I don't remember the details. There were other numeric fields coming up in scientific notation also, and I just went for what worked first. I prefer elegant, and usually go for that and it's more functional too in most contexts in my opinion, but it was pushing against the deadlines too.

Later on I'll learn how to output the Excel format itself and tell it what to do with it.

Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
John Yeung
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2014 12:35 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: Getting a Handle on RPG’s Open Access

On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Alan Cassidy
<ACassidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For one project I finally ditched CPYTOIMPF and converted every data field

to an alpha string, and on some of the numeric fields I had to specially add an
extra single-quote on the left to force Excel to make it alphanumeric. That
was a date, in ISO format!

Interesting, and kind of confusing to me. First of all, I don't recommend the
prepend-a-single-quote approach, because then it introduces a character
(the single-quote) which isn't part of the data. If this is acceptable to the
recipient, fine, but it just doesn't "feel right" to me.

What's confusing to me is why you would want a date to be interpreted as
text. Are you saying that the data itself, in the database, was meant to be
character, and only by coincidence happened to be the string representation
of an ISO-format date? Or was it an actual date in the database? If an
actual date in the database, why wouldn't you want Excel to interpret it as a
date?

John Y.
--
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