Microsoft KB Archive/233544

= Certain Invalid Date Fields Are Converted to Valid Dates Which Are Returned to the Client Application =

Article ID: 233544

Article Last Modified on 3/25/2004

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft COM Transaction Integrator for CICS and IMS 4.0 SP2

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This article was previously published under Q233544



SYMPTOMS
A variable defined as COBOL type PICTURE 9(7) COMPUTATIONAL-3 (packed decimal) may contain a value to be converted to an automation type of "Date." This article relates to only the case where "Date only" is specified in the COM Transaction Integrator for CICS and IMS (COMTI) Component Builder (CB). That means the field contains a date value, but no time value.

Certain values placed in the COBOL variable are not converted by COMTI runtime as might be expected. For example, if 0x00000000 (nulls, or LOW-VALUES) are assigned to the variable by the COBOL program, the date, 12/31/1999, is returned to a Visual Basic client.

In another example, the value, +50, assigned by the COBOL program is returned to VB client as the date 2/19/2000. In yet another example, assigning 0x0000001f to the COBOL variable yielded the date 1/1/2000.



WORKAROUND
Assign a valid Julian date to the variable in the COBOL program, in the format, YYYYDDDx, where YYYY is the century and year, DDD is the day of the year, and x is not used.

On the mainframe, the x is actually the sign of the decimal number. It is not used by COMTI when converting the date to the automation type.



STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft SNA Server version 4.0.

Keywords: kbbug kbnofix KB233544

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