Dealing with Date's for Non English Access database's

[sorcerer11]

Hi Everyone,

I have a database which is used in ten different countries across Europe and Asia, and recently been having problems with different countries using different date formats. One example is one country would have their standard date format as 1.04.2005 another as 01.04.2005 and maybe even 01/04/2005. Is their anyway I can tell access to ignore all of the these different types of format and use a single standard for all.

I don't wont to be able to tell each country to change it's regional settings each time, because this can causes problems and users forget to change them when they get new PCs.

The end result is that sometime when it runs a report based on date's it would not show date's from the 1 to 9, because they didn't start with 01 to 09. Just wondering if anybody has come across this problem before and what perhaps is the best soultion for getting round this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[PHV]

A DateTime field hold the same value worldwide.
The regional settings is mainly for the presentation layer.
In your code when you have to deal with literal date always use an international unambiguous format like yyyy-mm-dd.

Hope This Helps, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884 or FAQ181-2886

 

[RoyVidar]

Unless you've done something foolish, and stored dates as text.... dates are stored as numbers, and the only time you need to worry about date formats, is when using dates in dynamic SQL.

Here are two explanations/descriptions of how to handle that International Dates in Access and Return Dates in US #mm/dd/yyyy# format.

Well, and the input masks are a hassle too, in international environments, so I prefer not to use them, but date pickers/validation after input.

Roy-Vidar

 

[sorcerer11]

The database wasn't actually written by me, I sorted of just inherited it! But the person who created it, had no knowledge of VBA, so has used a lot of macros and some very odd ways of dealing with the date's.

So I think I might try to recreate them using VBA and use the standard mm/dd/yyyy format. Hopefully this will prevent any strange problems with date format's in the future.