Microsoft KB Archive/174426

= PRB: Date in Text Box Displays Year With Four Digits =

Article ID: 174426

Article Last Modified on 2/24/2005

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0a

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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:   In Visual FoxPro 5.0 make sure that Set Century To  Rollover  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)  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
 Create a form with a text box called Text1.</li>  From the Command window execute the following command: Set Century Off </li>  Create a push button and enter the code below in the click event: ThisForm.Text1.value = {01/01/1999} </li>  Create a second push button and in the click event enter this code: ThisForm.Text1.value = {01/01/2000} </li></ol>

When you run the form and click the buttons, you see the century displayed when the second button is clicked.

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