DYing to get an answer

Calling all DataExpress (MBF UDA-whatever-it's-called-these-days) mavens.

I have a YYMMDD field that I am outputting as part of a report going to a SLK file.

I defined it as 8 long, DY, which is supposed to add a century to it.

Well it does, but it always adds '19' - there seems to be no pivot point that would get 2000 dates rendered correctly.

The manual talks about an ODBC_CENTURY_DATE var that you can set, though as ever, you cannot be quite sure this applies to the bit of MBF UDA-whatever-it's-called-these-days that you are trying to use. But I set it to 50 anyway; it made no difference.

Ho hum. No problem, I thought, and did my own pivot point logic, for CC-DATE:

"19"+DATE IF DATE > "500000"
"20"+DATE IF DATE <= "500000"

This works fine if I define CC-DATE as X8, and I get the expected representation, but of course, it's not a date field in the output.

If I give CC-DATE the type DY - and you don't seem to be able to give computed fields the subtype DY - the output is 01/01/1900, or some other strange corruption of a date, seemingly based on DXC reading the X(6) part of the date as if it were a DC date number.

I tried having CC-DATE as X, and then OUT-CC-DATE as =CC-DATE; but again, if it is type DY, I get 01/01/1900 or something in 2038....

Noting that when you work on DY dates, they are converted into and out of the intermediate field, I have something working, sort of, along the lines of

CC-DATE (8DY) is:

DATE IF DATE > "500000"
DATE + 36525 IF DATE <= "500000"

and I guessed right to say 'C' rather than 'M' for the conversion...

I got the 36525 by doing 01/01/2000 - 01/01/1900 in Excel.

But there's a small range of dates for which the calculation gives the wrong answer, so I would need a further IF, if my users were handling any dates in that range...

This 'simple' change took me 2 hours, and I was going to let sleeping dogs lie, but now the user wants another date representation field added, and this time of a field whose X6 presentation figures largely in the sorting and summarising - so I don't want to redefine that as DY.

So someone, please put me out of my misery; how do I do what I need simply? What am I missing, or misunderstanding, in the DXC manuals?
--
Roy Brown 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd useful, or believe to be beautiful' William Morris

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