FreeTDS Development Group

[Franck Martin <Franck AT sopac.org>]

I think freetds should output the date in the ISO format which I think is
something like '20010121 15:45:22', Then after it is up to the application
to convert it to the display format. I think all conversion function work
from ISO date to any date format.


Franck Martin
Network and Database Development Officer
SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission
Fiji
E-mail: franck AT sopac.org <mailto:franck AT sopac.org> 
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-----Original Message-----
From: James K. Lowden [mailto:jklowden AT speakeasy.org]
Sent: Tuesday, 18 December 2001 7:10 
To: TDS Development Group
Subject: [freetds] Re: datetime format


Hi Bradley, 

Bradley Bell wrote:
> isql uses db-lib, so maybe this is a limitation of db-lib?

What you're seeing in isql is db-lib's default conversion, the result (I
assume) of calling dbbind to make a string of a datetime field.  A
db-lib application can call dbdatecrack() and construct any string it
likes (or rely on server-side conversions, of course).  

You might be candidate #2 for Eric Deutsch's suggestion (Fri, 7 Dec 2001
16:22:30 -0800 (PST)) that freetds.conf allow a configurable default
datetime-to-varchar conversion.  

Eric Deutsch wrote:
> It would be sensational if one could specify in freetds.conf one's own
> strftime format string.  I like all my dates to show up as
> '2001-12-07 15:45:22' without having to CAST and CONVERT and stuff.  I do
> this by manually going into the FreeTDS driver and replacing the default
> format string with the one that produces this.

For the time being, you might want to apply his patch.  I'd be tempted
instead to interpose views or stored procedures between the tables and
the application to deal with vendor-specific behavior.