Date Fields

As its name implies, only dates can be entered into the date field.  The format of the date is defined in the Windows™ Control Panel for “short” dates.  These settings determine how the date will be displayed on the badge and to a certain extent, how the entry dialog field will be formatted.

The Control Panel allows you to specify the following:

1.  Order of “day”, “month” and “year”

2.  Separator character between items

3.  Whether or not leading zeros are displayed for month and day (e.g.: 01 for January or just 1)

4.  Whether or not the year contains the century digits.

The entry dialog picks up most of this formatting information.  The exception is the leading zero on days and months.  These are always required when entering dates.  If the Control Panel is set up to display in the order M/D/Y, without the century digits, then the entry dialog will show as:

You can enter digits wherever the "pound" sign is displayed.  If you enter any, all must be displayed.  You do not need to enter any other characters other than the digits.

If the Control Panel is set up to display in the order D/M/Y, with the century digits, then the entry dialog will show as:

When the century display is suppressed, the 2 digits you enter for the year have a value for the century automatically added to them.  This value can be set using the menu sequence Configuration, Date/Time Set Up.  For more information on this see the Configuration chapter under Program Settings.

The dialog appears to allow you to enter invalid dates like 44/32/96.  However, when you attempt to close the dialog by clicking on OK, the first invalid field will be detailed in a pop-up box.  After you close the box you can find the field in question and the correct digits can then be entered.

[For the technically inclined, when a database timestamp field is used to display a date only, the time is set to 00:00:00 in the database field.]