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More fun with dates in LotusScript (continued)
While the application we were working on won't have such values, we were very leery of treating such a date as a null date. We needed to find a way around this issue. And this is what we came up with -- a sub to copy date values from one field to another, preserving null values along the way.
Let me call out a few items in this code.
1 Function CopyDate(fromdoc As NotesDocument, fromfieldname As String, todoc As notesdocument, tofieldname As String, debug as variant, nlog As NotesLog)
On Error Goto genericerrors
'Mick Moignard Oct 2004: copy date field from one doc to another and preserve null date values
'Also avoid any string conversions, so that there cannot be any problems with date format translations between DMY and MDY
5 'NotesDocument.CopyAllItems and NotesDocument.CopyToDatabase preserve items as is.
If fromdoc.HasItem(fromfieldname) Then
Dim dt As notesitem
Set dt = fromdoc.GetFirstItem(fromfieldname)
10 If dt.Text = "" Then 'genuinely null date field, or a text field with no value
Dim ndt As New NotesDateTime(Today)
Call ndt.setanydate
Call ndt.setanytime
Call todoc.ReplaceItemValue(tofieldname, ndt)
15 Else
Call todoc.ReplaceItemValue(tofieldname, dt)
End If
Else
If debug Then Call nlog.LogError(Err,"CopyDate - From document does not have field specified. " & _ "
20 Fieldname = " & fromfieldname & ", Doc = " & fromdoc.UniversalID)
End If
Exit Function 'skip the error block
genericerrors:
25 Call nlog.LogError(Err,"CopyDate - " & Error$ & " - " & Cstr(Erl)& ", Doc = " & fromdoc.UniversalID)
End Function
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Lines 1, 19, and 25 show how we've managed debugging and error reporting in the whole of the code. We use a NotesLog to report activity and errors, and can turn on and off debugging reporting by use of the debug variant, which is also passed to all subs and functions in the application.
Lines 2 and 24/25 show how we report errors in every sub and function. It's very important in an application of any size to ensure that you have decent error trapping and reporting. 'Script makes this pretty easy, so there really is no excuse.
However, none of these are the problem we're trying to solve. That starts in line 1, where we pass in the name of the field to be copied, the document that contains the field, and the field name and document to be copied to.
The work starts in line 7 with some defensive code that checks to ensure the field we're to work on actually exists in the document passed. If so, we get it into a NotesItem. In line 10, we look to see if that NotesItem has a null value, and we do that by examining its text value, looking for "".
If it's null, we then create a new datetime field and set it to an all-null value in lines 12 and 13, with NotesDateTime.SetAnyDate and SetAnyTime, and write the results back to the new field in the destination document in line 14. Line 16 merely copies the non-null date/time to the new document.
And with this, our problems with rogue dates of 31/12/1899 disappeared. Whew.
Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.
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