Re: Passing a Null Date to a Procedure

[Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doug.

I'm on two minds on this.  On one hand, given RPG's lack of support
for nullable variables, using a fixed '0001-01-01' can make things
easier.

On the other hand, if you're dealing with the data outside of RPG,
then using an actual NULL'able field in the DB makes life easier.  For
example, you want to some derivative of the data into Excel.  With
NULL date fields you're ok, with fields containing '0001-01-01' you'll
have problems.  Sure you can put a case in there to convert
'0001-01-01' to NULL but it still gets to be a PITA.

Charles


On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Doug Palme <DPalme@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I argued for the 0001-01-01 date for null capable dates or when we need a
> date to be "null", it was a combination of management and the programmatic
> staff that made the decision as a group and as you can see, I lost :)
>
>
>
>
>
> From:   David FOXWELL <David.FOXWELL@xxxxxxxxx>
> To:     RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   01/04/2010 02:57 AM
> Subject:        RE: Passing a Null Date to a Procedure
> Sent by:        rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
> Happy new year all,
>
> We pass a lot of dates to procedures and always need to know if the value
> is null.
>
> Actually, we have no null capable date fields in our db. We record the
> value 0001-01-01 to represent a null date. All our programs have the
> constant gNULL_DATE from a copybook and the parameter would be compared
> with that.
>
> I always wondered why we never used real null values and didn't realise
> that this would be an issue or that RPG did not have full null support.
>
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