I asked this Q in the DB Reporting TA but I'm not getting any takers so I thought I'd give it a shot here.
I have written a program which reads an input text file (tab delimited fields), validates the data and inserts some records into a MSSQL 2000 database.
One of the fields is a date, meant to be in the format DD/MM/YYYY.
Under declare-variable I have described $mydate as a date field.
I use the command ...... let $mydate = strtodate(&inputdate,'DD/M
But when I put an invalid date (eg 30/02/2004) into my test data, the BRIO program crashes.
Which is fair enough I guess. So I need to validate the date before I put it thru the strtodate command.
Which brings us to my question. I don't want to reinvent the wheel and write a comprehensive date validation routine in a language I'm struggling with. Does BRIO offer a tool or command I can use? Or do any of you guys have some BRIO code that would be helpful?
Thanks for any advice.
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agree with esteban ... in the sense that
if you data is likely to contain errors , (or be subject to changes due to changeing versions of software with which its created...)
then an approach is to first load the data into a basic flat charcter table
and then make use of stored procedures etc to confirm the data validity and
produce error reports etc...
then once you've transferred the clean data to its rightful place use BRIO for the reporting purposes for
which its intended
....
ISDATE is SQL server function
as you say there doesn't appear to be one for BRIO...
is this any help from the BRIO Getting Started Manual (8.1)
SQL Error Checking
SQR checks and reports database errors for SQL statements. When an SQR
program is compiled, SQR checks the syntax of the SELECT, UPDATE,
INSERT, and DELETE. SQL statements in your program. Any SQL syntax error
is detected and reported at compile time, before the execution of the report
begins.
When you use dynamic SQL, SQR cannot check the syntax until run time. In
that case, the content of the dynamic variable is used to construct the SQL
statement, which can allow syntax errors to occur in run time. Errors could
occur if the dynamic variables selected or used in a WHERE or ORDER BY clause
were incorrect.
SQR traps any run-time error, reports the error, and aborts the program. If
you want to change this default behavior, use the ON-ERROR option of the
BEGIN-SELECT or BEGIN-SQL paragraphs.
Note SQR invokes the ON-ERROR option when it safely can. If SQR can recover from a database
error, the user is given the chance to fix the error. If SQR cannot recover from a database error,
it will exit from the program.
begin-select on-error=give_warning
[$col1] &column1=char (,1)
[$col2] &column2=char (,#pos)
position (+1)
from customers
order by [$my_order]
end-select
In this example, if a database error occurs, SQR invokes a procedure called
give_warning instead of reporting the problem and aborting. Write this
procedure as follows:
begin-procedure give_warning
display ’Database error occurred’
display $sql-error
end-procedure ! give_warning
The brio manuals are available here
http://dev.hyperion.com/re
hth
Lowfatspread,
Thanks for your input.
Yeah, I have stumbled upon and used the SQL error checking but the instruction that crashes my program is not SQL. It is "strtodate", which lets you convert a string containing a date into a date field.
It's beginning to sound as though I will need to develop my own SQR date validation routine. Quel drag.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: esteban_felipePosted on 2004-02-19 at 19:27:57ID: 10409233
Hi iainmac,
the IsDate() functions do this...
btw, you are using Microsoft SQl server, right?
Esteban Felipe
www.estebanf.com