Re: Set a date to default value

On 12/11/2017 2:54 PM, George Smith wrote:

I have the Default set in the definition of the column. I am attempting to use an RPG Write state to update/load a table from an another table and convert the dates to a Date data type in the process. Some of the dates from the input table are not assigned, i.e. are zeros, so I wanted to load a default value because I thought the Date data type would not accept zeros directly.

Translating zero to 1980-0101 is not how DEFAULT works with RLA. As
Dave notes, DEFAULT is what happens when the RPG program doesn't have
EX$DRQJ in the list of columns. You can do that with O-specs, data
structures, a logical file/view...

But since you sometimes /do/ have legal dates, if I were in your shoes,
I'd do the conversion inside your RPG program. Write a quick
sub-procedure that takes a numeric variable as input and returns a date
variable as its output. When the %date() falls over, return your
desired default. Now, every incoming numeric 'date' gets sanity checked
before it goes into the database.