Re: Forms 3.0, Rpt and Year 2000

[Quoted] On Sat, 04 Jul 1998 13:14:37 GMT, ironmtn_at_my-dejanews.com wrote:

>I am also looking for the same information. There is some information on
>Oracle's web site (metallink) but it would be helpful to find someone who has
>done work in this area. I am also looking to upgrade the forms 3.0 to 4.5 (I
>think via 4.0) - maybe there is a third party software package that can help
>with this.
>
>I will pass on anything interesting and would appreciate anything you can
>find.
>
>Steve
>
>In article <359CAB31.A3BD1772_at_deagostini.it>,
> Andrea.Cannaos_at_deagostini.it wrote:
>>
>> Whe have a lot of forms developed with Forms 3.0 and some RPT ; so we
>> need to make these YEAR 2000 compliant :
>>
>> We need hints, bugs and everithing that can help us !!!!!

[Quoted] The principle is to let all date conversions be done in the database with one of Oracle's new "RR" format string. As long as the original developers used the DATE column type for dates that should solve your problem.

Of course, you will have to scan your applications to see what other techniques might have been used.

For rpt it is probably sufficient to scan for "TO_DATE", change the format mask to the equivalent "RR" mask and then scan all uses of the involved variables. If you have less than say 50 rpt sources, or when there are many differences in coding style this is probably best done by hand.

For Sql*Forms 3 you need two procedures, one to fix all dates without a time component, one to fix the ones with a time component. Oracle has a white paper somewhere that describes how to build these procedures using SELECT... FROM DUAL;. It is possible to work out something similar with the PL/SQL string functions that does not need to go to the database, and so performs a little better.

One important bug :
[Quoted] All DATE fields will have to be changed to DATETIME. Else the procedure will not help.

Once these procedures have been created all dates will have to be subjected to them. Of course this leaves open all instances where a date has not been treated as such..

I hope this helped.

-- 
Henk de Wilde