Appointment duration from DateTime controls

[dgerisch]

I have an applet I’m working on that creates a dialog box to present to the user:

Set WhatForDlg = Utilities.NewControlBoxDialog
WhatForDlg.Caption = “Create appointment”

Set DateTime1 = WhatForDlg.AddDateTimeControl
With DateTime1
.Kind = fdtkTime
.Time = iTimePeriodBegin
.Caption = “Start Time:”
End with

Set DateTime2 = WhatForDlg.AddDateTimeControl
With DateTime2
.Kind = fdtkTime
.Time = iTimePeriodEnd
.Caption = “End Time:”
End with

This assumes that iTimePeriodBegin and iTimePeriodEnd are already defined. I want to adjust these using the dialog fields.

Set objRecipient = objAppt.Recipients.Add(GroupWise.Account.Owner.EmailAddress,,0)
With objAppt
.StartDate = iTimePeriodBegin
.EndDate = iTimePeriodEnd
.Duration =
End With

Just doing this creates the appointment with the original times, not the updated times.

The problem is that if I try .StartDate = DateTime1 (and .EndDate = DateTime2) then the result isn’t in the right format (and the applet errs out). Is there an easy way to convert the updated dialog datetime values into the right format for the appointment .StartDate and .EndDate ?

Thanks!

Topic

[Support 1]

>if I try .StartDate = DateTime1 (and .EndDate = DateTime2) then
>the result isn’t in the right format (and the applet errs out)

This will not work because the data type of DateTime1 and DateTime2 is DateTimePicker, whereas the data type of StartDate/EndDate is Date. See the Formativ Language Guide section on DateTimePicker and the GroupWise Object API documentation on Appointment.

Assuming iTimePeriodBegin and iTimePeriodEnd are updated to match the values set by the user in the dialog box, it looks like your appointment’s times are only partially set. The Formativ Language Guide section on DateTimePicker indicates that its properties include Date as well as Time. From your code excerpt it is not clear that the value of Date is included in iTimePeriodBegin/iTimePeriodEnd. To combine the values of Date and Time, simply add them:

  with DateTime1
    iTimePeriodBegin = .Date + .Time
  end with

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

That was exactly what I needed. Thank you!

[Support 3]

Thanks for your feedback.

You can also use the Formativ 2 to build custom forms and dialogs using the dynamic visual forms designer.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

So I like the idea of using the visual forms designer, from some of the sample applications, it looks like I’m going to be able to get the fine-grained control I want. However, I’ve run into a slightly different problem now. With the old dialog, I was picking up date+times in a human-readable format, and using that for iTimePeriodBegin and iTimePeriodEnd.

Now that I’m using the visual forms designer, I get errors about an OLE something and not a valid long number. Doing an export of the form to a file shows that the .Date data needs to be in the form of 39386.4694906366 (instead of 10/31/2007 11:54:00)

Sure enough, plugging that real number into iTimePeriodBegin and iTimePeriodEnd lets the dialog display.

What is the formula for computing this date+time number?

-Or-

Can I make the object DatePicker: TDateTimePicker be happy with a human readable date?

Thanks!

[Support 1]

I don’t think it’s possible to assign a value like “10/31/3007” to DateTimePicker.Date, which is really a floating point number.

Have you tried using the VBScript functions DateSerial(year, month, day) and TimeSerial(hour, minute, second)? You could use them to do something like:

  DateTimePicker.DateTime = DateSerial(2007, 10, 31) + TimeSerial(11, 54, 0)

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

It might be easier for me to compute the floating point number for DateTimePicker.Date than to parse the human readable string. (I’m not really a VBScript programmer). Is that number somthing like some-number-of-hours-since 1990?

The other possibility is just that I picked the wrong object type from the visual forms designer palette. I want the user to be able to use the equivalent of the classic Dlg.AddDateTimeControl

If I really had to, I could make my program (that is supplying me the time) output it in six different chunks like that so I wouldn’t have a big parsing job in front of me. But as long as I’m adapting that program, it might make sense to export the floating point number directly and just hand the dialog object the data it wants natively.

Thanks!

[Support 1]

I have generally found that it’s hard to write code that works with human-readable date/time values. When it’s necessary to record a date/time as a string, the UTC format is simple and easy to build or parse.

Why do you need to write code to work with the date/time in string form (human-readable or otherwise)? The reason I ask is for context; because there might be another way to solve the problem.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

This Formativ applet that I’m building is essentially a one-button click to add a blog entry to a person’s calendar. It’s a little more than this, but at it’s core, this is it.

What I’m doing, is running a (small) program on the PC, that keeps track of the “last update” time. So every six minutes (although the user can specify thier own cycle duration), this program updates an .ini file on the PC.

This last update time is used by the Formativ applet as the (proposed) appointment.enddate

When the applet finishes, it updates the same .ini file – putting the appointment.enddate into the entry for the next cycle’s appointment.startdate

So I want to pull .startdate and .enddate from an .ini file, present them to the user (let the user modify the entries to his or her heart’s content), post the calendar item, and then write out the last .enddate to the .ini file to be used as the next .startdate

The program on the PC continues to run, waiting for time to pass, for the duration of the cycle. When the current cycle is over, it updates the .ini file again with the new appointment.enddate

Thus, every time you click the button to launch the Formativ applet, you get to add a posted appointment to your calendar – that picks up where the last entry left off. Of course, there are radio buttons that let you skip the appointment text (but still update the time), or specify that this time went toward a particular something. But those are user interface pieces I want to deal with later.

It is true that I do not need the .ini file entries to be in human readable format. It is a little nicer from a debugging stand point – but that is a minor issue.

Does this explain the goal I am trying to reach?

Thanks!

[Support 3]

If you want to store the date time value as human readable format then you need to make sure the format is convertible by your solution. Date format can vary by work-station where user can set different date format (yyyymmdd, ddmmyyyy, etc). You can use the Year(), Month(), Day(), etc method to extract the part of the date and save to the ini file. You program then need to read the part to convert to the exact date. For example:

  
   aDate = now
   msgbox year(aDate) & month(aDate) & day(aDate) & hour(aDate) & minute(aDate) & second(aDate)

Another approach which I will recommend to save the date as ISO format then your program can easily convert the ISO value from the ini file to date. You do not need to worry about the date format when saving as ISO format.

  
   iISODate = utilities.DateToISO(now)

   msgbox utilities.ISOToDate(iISODate)

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

Hmmm. I still have a problem. I have a form I created using the visual forms designer named “NewTimeRecord”

iTimePeriodBegin = utilities.DateToISO(now)
iTimePeriodEnd = utilities.DateToISO(now)

NewTimeRecord.DatePicker.Date = iTimePeriodEnd
NewTimeRecord.TimeBeginPicker.Date = iTimePeriodBegin
NewTimeRecord.TimeEndPicker.Date = iTimePeriodEnd

but the applet crashes on the third line, “NewTimeRecord.DatePicker.Date = iTimePeriodEnd”

EVariantTypeCastError
<path to>.vbf
Could not convert variant of type (OleStr) into type (Double) at line 17, column 5

[Support 3]

datetimepicker.Date() is a Read/Write property. You may only pass in a DATE to the property. Its returns a DATE.

Utilities.DateToISO() method convert Date to ISO value and return as string. In your code above you are trying to pass the string to the Date() property which accept DATE.

See the valid format where iISODate could be the Date value you read from the INI file:
NewTimeRecord.DatePicker.Date = utilities.ISOToDate(iISODate)

At the end of the process, save the date to INI file as ISO format:
utilities.DateToISO(datetimepicker.date)

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

So the good news is that this code runs without error:

isoTimePeriodBegin = objIniFile.ReadString(“Section”, “advTimePeriodBegin”, “”)
isoTimePeriodEnd = objIniFile.ReadString(“Section”, “advTimePeriodEnd”, “”)

datetimeTimePeriodBegin = Utilities.ISOToDate(isoTimePeriodBegin)
datetimeTimePeriodEnd = Utilities.ISOToDate(isoTimePeriodEnd)

NewTimeRecord.DatePicker.Date = datetimeTimePeriodEnd
NewTimeRecord.TimeBeginPicker.Date = datetimeTimePeriodBegin
NewTimeRecord.TimeEndPicker.Date = datetimeTimePeriodEnd

If NewTimeRecord.ShowModal() = mrOK Then

isoTimePeriodEnd = Utilities.DateToIso(NewTimeRecord.TimeEndPicker.Date)
isoTimePeriodBegin = objIniFile.WriteString(“Section”, “advTimePeriodBegin”, isoTimePeriodEnd)

End If

The bad news is that the form displays the time field from when the form was defined – not from datetimeTimePeriodBegin or datetimeTimePeriodEnd.

[Support 3]

Based on the code above, when the Form displayed first there was not date saved to the INI file.
isoTimePeriodBegin = objIniFile.ReadString(“Section”, “advTimePeriodBegin”, “”)

I think after the first execution the date value stored to the INI file so the subsequent execution you should see the correct date value.

Basically, isoTimePeriodEnd will be empty for the very first execution. You can add some defensive code so the isoTimePeriodEnd may be refer to the a date. Example:

  
if (len(isoTimePeriodEnd) = 0) then
  isoTimePeriodEnd = Utilities.DateToIso(Date-1)
end if

Note, make sure you are saving the INI file to disk.

Regards,
Advansys Support

[Support 1]

Further to Support 3’s comments, is your code assigning the appropriate value to the Time/DateTime (as opposed to the Date) property?

For example:

  with NewTimeRecord
    .TimeBeginPicker.DateTime = datetimeTimePeriodBegin
    .TimeEndPicker.DateTime = datetimeTimePeriodEnd
  end

Regards,
Advansys Support

[dgerisch]

Sorry about the late reply – but yes, this was the info I needed. Thank you. 🙂

[Author]

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