Julian Date issue in Ellipse 5.2.1 1

[verekar]

Hi,

Mincom is currently pushing one of our clients for an upgrade to Ellipse version 6 from verion 5.2.1 citing the fact that a "julian date" issue with the older version will corrupt all data by May 17th 2007.

I want to know if anyone has faced this problem before and if there is a patch available that will solve the problem instead of going for an expensive upgrade.

Thanks

Verekar

 

[Drw]

Upgrading to the next version of Ellipse (5.2.3.X or grater)is the patch; unfortunately you don't have any other choice because the 'Julian Date' versions of MIMS/Ellipse start to report the date as being 01/01/1980 after the Julian Date restarts at 0000.

 

[verekar]

Drw,

Thanks for your response. But do you think the later versions of Ellipse are free from this issue?

Thanks

Verekar

 

[Drw]

Yes, they are free from the issue caused by Julian Dates because the process date has been changed to the Mincom Date field format of CHAR(8) CCYYMMDD. There is however several other 'date' type problems with Ellipse. These are with the shortened Period Fields which do no show the Century and the dat input fields which do not allow for all the types of date formats which often remove the Century. There is a centralised Date subroutine (mssdat) which has hard coded values (in our version 2025 & 1926) and also the bad coding by multiple developers who decided not to use this centralised subroutine and created there own calculations for deciding which century to use. These date issues are not major but are legacy of the ‘old’ Cobol base to Ellipse. Hopefully Mincom will modernise there treatment of date/time data by using the native Database date format (like in Oracle) and similarly available data types in Java.

 

[verekar]

Drw,

Thanks again.

Verekar

 

[Calator]

verekar,

pls see following thread which has additional info and answers to your question

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=820030