Neil writes:

>Over the last few months we have been working on adding features to Suprtool
>to help make the impending century change more palatable. I have noticed
>that a *lot* of other third-party vendors and application programmers are
>of course doing the same.
>
>A common thread is that some people are specifying a cutoff parameter so that
>they can assume a particular century based on the year value. This is of
>course for those date formats that only have a two-digit year.
>
>The problem with this of course is the user must insure that the cutoff date
>is the same for all his/her applications, in order to get consistent results.
>
>I propose that HP create a setable HPDATECUTOFF variable so that all
>third-party software companies and application programmers can retrieve
>the value of the variable and use this in their application. This will
>insure that the Cutoff value will be consistent for all applications.
>
>Of course, personally I think that everyone should be moving to four-digit
>years, or maybe even six-digit years. :) Sorry I couldn't resist.
>
>e.g.
>  0019970211
>  ccccyymmdd

While this is a nice idea, we have standardized on using a date class
for our cutoff control. This allows different components of the same
application to use different cutoff dates where appropriate. The
variables used to control the date cutoff are set by date class and
the application retrieves the date cutoff by date class.

This is for use in areas of the application where we don't have 8 digit
dates. We do prefer to use 8 digit dates whenever possible.


Duane Percox ([log in to unmask]  v/415.306.1608 f/415.365.2706)
http://www.qss.com/          http://www.qss.com/qwebs
http://www.qss.com/faq3k     http://www.qss.com/qsdk