PRB: Date in Text Box Displays Year With Four Digits (174426)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows 5.0
  • Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows 5.0a
This article was previously published under Q174426

SYMPTOMS

The dates in your text boxes display the year with four digits even with the setting of SET CENTURY OFF.

CAUSE

This is by design and is necessary for year 2000 compliance.

RESOLUTION

To be year 2000 compliant you must display the year with four digits. If, however, you want to have just the two-digit year to make data entry easier, you can set the StrictDateEntry text box property to 0. With this property set to 0, the date is loosely formatted and can take a space, period, hyphen, and forward slash as separators. This also allows you to leave off the year, and it assumes the current year.

Other hints to make data entry of dates easier are listed below:
  1. In Visual FoxPro 5.0 make sure that Set Century To <nCentury> Rollover <nYear> command is set properly. A recommended setting would be: 
    m.nYear = Year(Date())+ 50   && Set the rollover 50 years from today.
Set Century To (Int(m.nYear/100)-1) Rollover (m.nYear % 100)
  2. Use the plus and minus keys to increment and decrement a date in a text box. This only works if the entire field is selected, so you may want to set the text box property SelectOnEntry to .t.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

MORE INFORMATION

This feature is called Auto-Century. Auto-Century was added to Visual FoxPro in version 3.0 to ensure that any date written in a text box had the century that the user intended. Auto-Century operates differently in Visual FoxPro 3.0 than it does in Visual FoxPro 5.0a due to minor enhancements.

In version 3.0b, the text box displays 4-digit dates whenever the year is greater than 1999.

In version 5.0a, the text box displays 4-digits whenever the century portion of the year is greater than SET CENTURY TO and it ignores the ROLLOVER value.

Steps to Reproduce Behavior

  1. Create a form with a text box called Text1.
  2. From the Command window execute the following command: 
    Set Century Off
  3. Create a push button and enter the code below in the click event: 
    ThisForm.Text1.value = {01/01/1999}
  4. Create a second push button and in the click event enter this code: 
    ThisForm.Text1.value = {01/01/2000}
When you run the form and click the buttons, you see the century displayed when the second button is clicked.

REFERENCES

Visual FoxPro Help; search on: "StrictDateEntry"

(c) Microsoft Corporation 1997, All Rights Reserved. Contributions by David Botzenhart, Microsoft Corporation
Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:2/24/2005
Keywords:kbnofix kbprb KB174426
©2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.