Here's a strange little quirk that should probably be fixed. Not urgent, but worthy of reporting I think.

We have just been revalidating the dataset, prior to creating an NBN export and it has thrown up a number of "invalid" items in LOCATION_DESIGNATION. Checking into the details of the items marked as invalid, the tool is reporting that "The Start Date must be a valid standard date and it cannot be after today's date of 28/02/2013." I checked and in all cases the LOCATION_DESIGNATION.DATE_FROM is both valid and before today.

However, the records in question have all been inserted by a process external to the R6 UI. Essentially I have a program which manages a three-stage Local Wildlife Site status (first sites are proposed, then marked as selected when certain criteria are met, finally being given Wildlife Site status when the details have been ratified by an expert panel). Of course this situation is unique to our system, but I can think of a number of other situations where data might be inserted into the database without going via the UI and I think the same vulnerability would apply, for example if a large number of location designations were pasted in via SQLMS, or the Access db, or updated by means of a query in either of these.

It turns out that the DATE_FROM field is of Datetime format and my program is inserting the date & time at full precision (e.g.12-03-2013 11:25:32.123), while the revalidate tool is expecting and checking for just the date part, without the time. Thus it reports my entries as invalid, when they are clearly not.

Of course I can (and will) fix my program so it only inserts the date part, but as I said, there are other possibilities where such items might be updated externally, in this particular instance my code inserts a value derived using the vba function Now() which returns a full precision datetime value and I have used this extensively when inserting other things in via the back-end. This is the first time I have encountered this problem with revalidation.

So it would be nice if the revalidation tool could be fixed at some point so it recognises full precision dates as valid.