2

I have a textbox without calendar control and we will call it as publication year(we use diff name in our project). The publication year is 1999, 2001 or 1860.

My step goes like this

I have datetime in my database.(unchangable)

I am using C# and sql server 2005.

string date = textBox1.text;
Datetime dt = Convert.ToDateTime(date);

I pass dt to my database using dynamic sql

to trick the code, I added a prefix 1/1/ before my entered date like 1/1/2010 , it worked well

Now my TL asked me not to do like that.... I am ??? . Please help

Karthik Ratnam
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  • @Lucero: probably "Team Lead" – NotMe May 02 '11 at 20:31
  • @Chris Lively, yeah maybe. But then this begs the question why the Team Lead didn't suggest a better way of doing it. – Lucero May 02 '11 at 20:38
  • @Lucero: I guess that would beg the question of why "Lead" would be in their title. ;) Maybe another L word is appropriate. – NotMe May 02 '11 at 20:40
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    IF you manipulate dates based on strings, I would recommend to **always** use the standardized ISO-8601 format (`YYYYMMDD`) since that is not dependent on any regional, language, locale settings and will always work. So in your case, just turn your `2010` into `20100101` and then your conversion will always work without problems. – marc_s May 02 '11 at 21:02

3 Answers3

8

It sounds like you should really:

  • Parse the text as an integer
  • Create a new DateTime with that year, and January 1st as the day/month.

For example:

int year;
if (int.TryParse(textBox1.Text, out year))
{
    DateTime dt = new DateTime(year, 1, 1);
}
else
{
    // Handle input
}
Jon Skeet
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4

As a note, if you only care about the year then I would highly suggest that the database field should be an Int instead of a DateTime.

The minimum sql datetime value is 1/1/1753 for a number of reasons that you can certainly look up. However, the point is that a regular DateTime field is storing way more information than you care about.

So if you deal with publications older than 1753 you're going to run into an architectural issue. And, if somehow you didn't, you'd certainly run into issues deciding if a publication was 280 years old or 279 or 281...

Community
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NotMe
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  • +1 - and regarding publications before 1753 the best may be to just switch to SQL Server 2008 and use `datetime2` ;) – Lucero May 02 '11 at 20:43
0

You could use a drop down list with the available years? If there are only three possible publication years, then this would make more sense as an input control. Grab the year and pad the DateTime month and day values with "1" each.

IrishChieftain
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