Re: HOW TO HANDLE ZEROS IN DATE FIELD?

> On Sep 3, 2004, at 11:36 PM, James M Doherty wrote:
>
>> I have a project that is taking input from another system. I have
>> certain columns defined as 'Date' Columns. On input I will get 
>> '000000' in this field which causes the insert to fail.


> 000000 is not a valid date, as you are aware :) This is often solved in
> the application layer by preprocessing the data, changing 000000 to
> NULL, for example. You may be able to do some of this preprocessing in
> the database itself, first loading the raw data into a temporary table
> and then transforming it before putting it into the desired table.
>

I've CC'd the list as well.

On Sep 11, 2004, at 9:44 PM, James M Doherty @ jdoherty.net wrote:

>     I was hoping I could do something in my insert trigger to change it 
> on the
> way in and avoid code in client applications. The reason for this is 
> there
> are
> many client application which will be doing these inserts.

In that case I would recommend either using temp tables to process the 
data, or build a middleware app that other client apps would connect 
to, rather than to the db directly, the goal being to have a single API 
against which you can code the client apps.

Good luck!

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com