What if after 01/01/2000 a person at the key board imputs a two digit date field....would this recorrupt a compliant program???

-- Les (leslie.leblanc@gte.net), July 30, 1999

Answers

Forgive them lord, for they know not what they ask through the keyboard.

-- KeyBoardBoy (keyboardboy@clickclack.com), July 30, 1999.

Les, The answer is - no.

-- R (riversoma@aol.com), July 30, 1999.

If Flint wrote the program, probably :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), July 30, 1999.

Hoffmeister ... certainly!

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), July 30, 1999.

Actually, this is NOT a dumb question.

I was assessing a specialized DB app last month. VB frontend, Access back end. Very common design. Very expensive.

Vendor says it's compliant. For fun I open a new record. go to the date of birth field, and see this: __/__/____. Cool! 4-digit years.

I enter a date:02/02/2000 Date stored in the database: 02/02/2000

I enter another date: 02/02/00 Date stored in the DB: 02/02/1900!

This app was WORSE than non-compliant. It looked compliant, the vendor says it is, but was NOT. It would have corrupted the data. It had a snazzy input mask that didn't actually do anything because the back end data table it was feeding was set to 2-digit years.

Test EVERYTHING!

Your mileage may vary.

-- (PCDBWeenie@home.today), July 31, 1999.