Re: Quick question: catching exceptions in MOVE statements on time/date data

Yes the time difference won't be that significant in this case. But given the low failure rate I'd still go with Monitor.

Basic reason is that using monitor you are effectively saying. "I'm going to convert this to a date but if that fails I will do this to recover". That is pretty self-documenting. The intent of using TEST(E) is not obvious until you look at the next bit of code and see the different behaviour depending on whether there was an error or not.

Another way of looking at it is that Monitor implies that something is expected to work but identifies the error handling.


Jon Paris
Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Mar 13, 2025, at 2:05 PM, James H. H. Lampert via RPG400-L <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 3/13/25 10:59 AM, Jon Paris wrote:

OOOOpppppppsssss
Forget the last post - of course, TEST(E) can do it.
The only downside is that you are effectively validating the value
twice.
For me I would only use TEST(E) if I anticipated a fairly high error
rate (for example when validating user input) but would use MONITOR
when I only expect 1 in a few thousand to fail.

Thanks to both Jon and Brian. The failure rate is more like 1 in 18k records, but at the same time, since there's a web service call involved in the program (as well as other time-expensive steps), double validation would likely have only a negligible effect on execution speed.

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JHHL
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