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Re: Date format

Hi,

I'm seeing very confusing date behaviour in a new installation of Recorder 6 on Citrix and hope somebody can shed some light.  I do not know Citrix so apologies if I do not use the correct terminology (I'm having to achieve things via an IT Helpdesk).  The documentation says that Recorder uses the system date settings but I am seeing a mix of things happening.

When we access Recorder via a Citrix desktop the system seems to be set for mm/dd/yyyy and I am not permitted to get it changed it due to fear of unknown impacts upon other systems for other users.  As expected Excel defaults to mm/dd/yyyy. However, within Recorder the record date displays as dd/mm/yyyy.  Despite this, when it imports records from Excel that have been date formatted as dd/mm/yyyy it sees them as mm/dd/yyyy and so rejects them.  I can work around this by changing the date format setting within the Recorder import wizard to mm/dd/yyyy but then this falls down on records with single column date ranges e.g. "14/03/2010-19/03/2010".  Again I can work around this by rewriting the dates as e.g. "03/14/2010-03/19/2010" but this is all an extra layer of complication and should not be necessary.  It also suggests that other date related operations will fail further down the line.

Can anybody suggest what is happening?  If I manage to convince our IT department to change the system date format, will Recorder then flip over to mm/dd/yyyy?  Is there a setting I have not spotted yet?

Mike Beard
Natural Course Project Officer
Greater Manchester Local Records Centre

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Re: Date format

The record date within recorder is held as an integer and I think this is converted to a vague date string before displaying so the setting on the system will probably not affect the way the record date is displayed within Recorder. I don't know for sure but I assume that date operations within Recorder (ie reporting etc.) do take into account the system setting. If you haven't noticed any problems this this is probably the case.  This has been a little difficult for me to test, but changing the date format on my machine had no affect on the way Recorder displayed the dates and the entry dates (which are held as date time) were treated correctly.  The issue seeme to be around the import Wizard.  Possibly changing the format of the date cells to text may be the answer help or exporting the  files  to  .txt  and importing in this format.

Mike Weideli

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Re: Date format

Thanks Mike.  I can confirm that the reports are coming out OK and the text file work around is not too onerous so we have something we can operate with. 

I am not entirely sure that your explanation adds up with what I have seen.  First of all we tried using Recoder as a Citrix application and it was displaying the event dates incorrectly and validating dates incorrectly during manual input, insisting on mm/dd/yyyy.  This really became a showstopper when the date was entered as just a year because it seemed to be using different formats for the resulting vague date and the validation.  Our IT Helpdesk said to swap over to the Citrix Desktop method of access, which is our current situation as on my initial post. I cannot do comparative testing now because the application route produces the error "Error accessing the OLE registry." I do not know what they did to break it.

Probably not a huge problem, as it only seems to be an issue if you do not have dd/mm/yyyy as your system date, which in almost all likely situations is the standard (unless Recorder is going to be used in America?)

Mike Beard
Natural Course Project Officer
Greater Manchester Local Records Centre

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Re: Date format

I have tried various things with the date format on my standalone PC set the English (USA) and everything seems OK.  I admit that I am not  sure exactly   how Recorder is handling this.

Mike Weideli