use regional settings for prompts 3

[KellyK]

Hi all. I'm asking this question on behalf of a coworker so I hope this makes sense. Awhile ago she'd notice that one user's reports would return larger datasets than the same report run on her machine. After speaking to an IT guy, they discovered that the user with the "good" data had changed something in one of her .ini files to use the regional settings for date values. When her date prompts came up, they would be in the form mm/dd/yyyy. The user on the "bad" machine saw date prompts in the form mm-dd-yyyy. Somehow the report with the '/' was grabbing more than the one with the '-'. Has anyone experienced this before, and if so, could you tell us which line in which .ini file needs to be changed? The original IT guy is no longer with us.

Thanks! Kelly

 

[TPU]

Kelly,
You should be able to change it under Start, Setting, Control Panel, Regional Options. It will let you pick the date format and what kind of separator.

Tom

 

[KellyK]

Thanks for the reply, Tom. I probably didn't state the problem correctly. What we want to do is figure out how to configure Cognos to use the regional settings that we have on the computer. Apparently our Impromptu is configured to ignore regional settings and use '-' as the separator. We want to be able to say "use whatever separator we have set in our Regional Settings." Is this making any sense?

Kelly

 

[angiole]

You might try this to get around any personal settings on p/c's.

Change the filter from

date1 = date prompt to

date_to_string(date1) = string prompt

date_to_string returns the date in yyyy-mm-dd format regardless of control panel settigns.

 

[griffindm]

KellyK,

Try this (from the Cognos knowledgebase):

Description:

When attempting to enter a date prompt value for an Impromptu report and clicking OK, the value is not accepted.

The date prompt is in the format (separator and style) as what is specified in the regional settings / options for the current windows user, but the value is still not being accepted

Solution:

The date prompt will not be accepted if the format differs from what is specified in the registry for the 'idate' parameter. This is in the registry at

(NT and 2000)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International\idate

There are 3 values:

0 = M/D/Y
1 = D/M/Y
2 = Y/M/D

If, for example, a format of 'yyyy/MM/dd' is being used in the regional settings, then 'idate' must be set to 2 for Impromptu to accept the field.

Similarly, if the format is mm/dd/yy then the idate must be set to 0.

HTH,

Dave Griffin

 

[griffindm]

Correction note on above post: Date prompts using regional settings only works on Impromptu 6 RBF 3 and above.

Dave Griffin

 

[Pommie]

You also might want to check the settings in the Impromptu INI file. Try using "format data via regional settings=1" (ignoring quotes).

It worked for me.

John

 

[griffindm]

Pommie,

What section of the Impromptu INI was that value under?

Dave Griffin

 

[griffindm]

Picked up the missing info on Pommie's suggestion regarding date prompts: From Cognos:

Description:

In Impromptu RBF 3 and up, the format for Date prompts is set via the Regional Settings for the User running the IWR Service on the Server.

How can this be overwritten and reset to how it used to work previously?


Solution

This can be overwritten and reset to how it used to work previously by adding the following option in the impromptu.ini file:

[Startup Options]
format data via regional settings=0

The entry to change the format is:
format data via regional settings=1


HTH,

Dave Griffin ;-)

 

[KellyK]

Thanks guys! Kelly