Re: Format dates in Forms 4.0

In article <1994Oct24.172022.55_at_rediris.es> diez_at_rediris.es writes:
>From: diez_at_rediris.es
>Subject: Format dates in Forms 4.0
>Date: 24 Oct 94 17:20:22 +0100
 

>That's the problem:
 

>I'm working with a date field in FORMS 4.0.13.15.0 with a format like
>DD/MM/YYYY (the date comes from a table). This format works good if i
>fill it with the EXACT format i especified, for example 12/12/1994, but
>if i fill it with the date like 12121994, it understands the date like
>12/21/0094, because it overwrites positions 3th and 6th with the slashes
>especified in the format.
 

>But this is not the end, because i can fill it with 12j12j1994 and understand
>the correct date. It doesn't matter if the character used between the day and
>the month and between the month and the year is '/' or any other one.
 

>In FORMS 3.0 i can fill the date like 12121994 or 12/12/1994, because it
>applies the format when i leave the field, and it understands 12/12/1994
>in both cases.
 

>We ask for this to our support in Spain, but they said it was an improvement
>for dates in this version. Is this an improvement?. Is there any way to
>manage the format of the dates in FORMS 4.0 like in FORMS 3.0?.
 

>Thanks.
 

>Mario D¡ez (Email miguel.diez_at_sociol.es)
>Centro de Investigaciones Sociol¢gicas
>c/ Montalb n, 8
>28014 - Madrid
>Spain

Hi,

  We had the same problem. Here is the response of Oracle Support:

     Known bug from bug 188284.

     This change in fonctionality was done intentionally. The basic reason for doing this was to tighten up the Date routine input processing. There were many cases where the Dates package would accept very questionable input. The decision was made that the default parsing would just skip over the same number of chars in the input as where found in the format mask without checking to make sure that they match up. There is a format option, the FX format modifier, that causes the Dates routines to do strict checking of the literal text but this is not the default. At this point it would break a tremendous amount of code trying to change this behavior back to what was done in V3.

     There is a possibility of adding in a new format modifier that would attempt to provide the same fonctionality as that that was provided in V3 but it would be very difficult to change the default behavior back. Received on Thu Oct 27 1994 - 19:51:20 CET