ADO ADDBTIMESTAMP format changes - sql-server

OK, so, here's an odd one, which is causing me to lose what little hair I have left.
We have some code that uses ADO to pull data from SQL Server. The code's been in place for 7 or 8 years now, and hasn't been touched for quite a while.
In the function, where we check the returned field's type for some conversion, we have this:
case ( fieldType = ADDBTIMESTAMP$ )
* // A date/time stamp (yyyymmddhhmmss plus a fraction
* // in billionths)
* // Looksd like we're just getting MM/DD/YYYY
* // ooh no sometimes we get 6/25/2010 11:35:00 AM
Basically, this is saying that when the field's type is ADDBTIMESTAMP (or 135), then for whatever reason, the date is being returned MM/DD/YYYY sometimes with, and sometimes without a time stamp.
This morning, all date fields are now returning values YYYY-MM-DD (dashes included).
I haven't changed this code. The network people swear up and down that they haven't updated or modified SQL Server. My workstation is Win10, so who knows what's changed on that, but I don't see any indication of updates for the past few days.
Obviously, something's changed, considering we're now getting the data back in a what should be the correct format, but for the life of me, I can't see what could have happened.
Any help or tips or psychiatric recommendations would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Basically, it's a configuration issue on the workstation I'm using. No other workstation appears to have the problem. I don't think I'll ever find out what happened. To be honest, now that I've looked at the code, which I've never needed to before, I'm more concerned that it's always been returning wrong on every machine for the last 7 or 8 years.
It's things like this that make me want to go into a less stressful line of work, like opening a restaurant.
Thanks.

Related

Convert FileTime to DateTime in Azure Logic App

I'm pretty new to Logic App so still learning my way around custom expressions. One thing I cannot seem to figure out is how to convert a FileTime value to a DateTime value.
FileTime value example: 133197984000000000
I don't have a desired output format as long as Logic App can understand that this is a DateTime value and can be able to run before/after date logic.
To achieve your requirement, I have converted the Windows file Time to Unix File Time then converted to File time by add them as seconds to a default date 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. Here is the Official documentation that I followed. Below is the expression that worked for me.
addSeconds('1970-01-01T00:00:00Z', div(sub(133197984000000000,116444736000000000),10000000))
Results:
This isn't likely to float your boat but the Advanced Data Operations connector can do it for you.
The unfortunate piece of the puzzle is that (at this stage) it doesn't just work as is but be rest assured that this functionality is coming.
Meaning, you need to do some trickery if you want to use it to do what you want.
By this I mean, if you use the Xml to Json operation, you can use the built in functions that come with the conversion to do it for you.
This is an example of what I mean ...
You can see that I have constructed some XML that is then passed into the Data parameter. That XML contains your Windows file time value.
I have then setup the Map Object to then take that value and use the built in ado function FromWindowsFileTime to convert it to a date time value.
The Primary Loop at Element is the XPath query that will make the selection to return the relevant values to loop over.
The result is this ...
Disclaimer: I should point out, this is due to drop in preview sometime in the middle of Jan 2023.
They have another operation in development that will allow you to do this a lot easier but for now, this is your easier and cheapest option.
This kind of thing is also available in the Transform and Expert operations but that's the next tier level of pricing.

parseISO in date-fns showing the incorrect date

I'm attempting to understand what exactly date-fns is doing when using parseISO() as it seems to be adding 2 hours to the time that I have saved in the database. The data is as follows:
ISO Date/Time saved in database: 2022-09-20T19:52:53.000Z
Using format(parseISO(2022-09-20T19:52:53.000Z), "HH:mm:ss") I get this: 21:52:53 hrs
Somewhere along the line 2 hours are being added and unsure as to the cause. A comment left by Monash Joshi in (stackoverflow issue) hints towards an explanation but not really a solution. Want I want to show is just the parsed date/time value as it is. Would it thus make sense to manipulate the string that I receive from the database myself?
Thanks in advance for your help! And let me know if you need any further information.

"?" character in MSSQL DB getting replaced with (capital A with grave accennt) when displayed by ASP script

I'm attempting to provide support for a legacy ASP/MSSQL web application - I wasn't involved in the development of the software (the company that built it no longer exists) & I'm not the admin of the server where it's hosted, I just manage the hosting for the owners of the site via a reseller account. I'm also not an ASP developer (more a PHP guy), and am not that familiar with it beyond the basics - updating DB connection strings after server migrations, etc.
The issue is that the site in question stores the content of individuals pages in an MSSQL database, and much of the content includes links. Almost all of the internal links on the site are format like "main.asp?123" (with "123" being the ID of a database row). The problem is, starting sometime in the last 8 months or so*, something caused the links in the DB content to show up as "main.aspÀ123" instead - in other words, the "?" character is being replaced by the "À" character (capital A with grave accent). Which, of course, breaks all of those links. Note that Stackoverflow won't allow me to include that character in the post title, because it seems to think that it indicates I'm posting in Spanish...?
(*unfortunately I don't know the timing beyond that, the site owners didn't know when the issue started occurring, so all I have to go by is an archive.org snapshot from last October, where it was working)
I attempted to manually change the "?" character in one of the relevant DB records to "?" (the HTML entity for the question mark), but that didn't make any difference. I also checked the character encoding of the HTML code used to display the content, but that doesn't seem to be the cause either - the same ASP files contain hard-coded links to some of the same pages (formatted exactly the same way), and those work correctly: the "?" doesn't get replaced.
I've also connected to the database directly with the MSSQL Management Studio Express application, but couldn't find any charset/character encoding options for either the database or the table.
And I've tried contacting the hosting provider, but they (M247 UK, in case anyone is curious) have been laughably unhelpful. The responses from them have been along the lines of "durrrrrr, we checked a totally different link that wasn't actually the one that you clearly described AND highlighted in a screenshot, and it works when we check the wrong link, so the problem must be resolved, right?" Suffice it to say, I wouldn't recommend them - used to be a customer of RedFox hosting, and the quality of customer has dropped off substantially since M247 bought them.
Any suggestions? If this were PHP/MySQL, I'd probably start by creating a small test script that did nothing but fetch one of the relevant records and display it's contents, to narrow down the issue - but I'm not familiar enough with ASP to do that here, at least not without a fair amount of googl'ing (and most of the info I can find is specific to ASP.net instead).
Edit: the thread suggested as a solution appears to be for character encoding issues when writing to MSSQL, not reading from it - and I've tried the solutions suggested in that thread, none make any difference.
Looks like you're converting from UNICODE to ASCII somewhere along the line...
Have a look at this to get a quick demo of what happens. In particular, pay attention to the ascii derived from inr, versus the ascii derived from unicode...
SELECT
t.n,
ascii_char = CHAR(t.n),
unicode_char = NCHAR(t.n),
unicode_to_ascii = CONVERT(varchar(10), NCHAR(t.n))
FROM (
SELECT TOP (1024)
n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ao.object_id)
FROM
sys.all_objects ao
) t
WHERE 1 = 1
--AND CONVERT(varchar(10), NCHAR(t.n)) ='À'
;
I found a workaround that appears to do the trick: I was previously trying to replace the ? in the code with &#63 (took out the ; so that it will show the code rather than the output), which didn't work. BUT it seems to work if I use &quest instead.
One thing to note, it seemed that I was originally incorrect in thinking that the issue was only affecting content being read/displayed from the MSSQL DB. Rather, it looks like the same problem was also occurring with static content being "echo'd" by code in the ASP scripts (I'm more of a PHP guy, not sure the correct term is for ASP's equivalent to echo is). Though the links that were hardcoded as static (rather HTML being dynamically output by ASP) were unaffected. Though chancing the ? to &quest worked for those ones too (hardest part was tracking down the file I needed to edit).

Dateformat mismatch in sql server and C# code

I have a problem.
I have an application in C# with SQL SERVER 2005 as backend.
The problem is in fetching the correct record based on the date.
The frontend code is
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(txtFromDate.Text))
SelectCmd.Parameters[0].Value = DBNull.Value;
else
SelectCmd.Parameters[0].Value = txtFromDate.Text;
Now if I run usp_NewGetUserDetail '03/04/2010' in the query analyser, I am able to get the correct record.
So I am preety confident that my SP is correct(I have tested with many variations).
But if the same value is passed from front end code(SelectCmd.Parameters[0].Value = "03/04/2010";), I am getting some unexpected record. By that I mean , the records which are not in the date range.
I guess that there is some mismatch in date format of backend and frontend.
Kindly let me know if I missed out some information that I need to provide for solving this
Please help.
Dealing with dates on SQL Server is a tricky business, since most formats are language- and locale-dependent. As Adam already mention - you should try to avoid dealing with dates as strings - it does get messy, and using DateTime (both in .NET and in T-SQL) is much safer and easier.
But if you must use strings, then be aware of these points: a date like 02/05/2010 will be interpreted as Feb 5, 2010 in some places, or as May 2, 2010 in others. So whatever you're doing - you'll always run into someone who has a different setting and gets different results.
The way to do here is to use the ISO-8601 format which is independent of all locale and language settings and just always works.
So for your dates, always use the YYYYMMDD format - first of all, it always works, and second of all, with that format, you get a "natural" sort behavior - sorted by Year, then Month, then Day.
There's no need to pass the date as a string, nor should you. Set the value of the parameters to a DateTime object that represents the date you want, not the string representation of it.
Try something like this:
DateTime fromDate;
if (DateTime.TryParse(txtFromDate.Text, out fromDate))
{
SelectCmd.Parameters[0].Value = fromDate
}
else
{
SelectCmd.Parameters[0].Value = DBNull.Value;
}

SQL Reporting Services 2005 - Non-queried Report Parameters

I'm working on a report in Reporting Services and I can't figure out why I'm having trouble with Non-queried report parameters.
I'm trying to get the current year and have tried:
=YEAR(TODAY())
=DATEPART("yyyy",TODAY())
I have also tried TODAY instead of TODAY()
All of these seem to break the Year dropdown on my report. I thought if something was wrong it would just not get the correct default... but nope, it breaks the whole field.
Any thoughts? articles?
UPDATE:
Wait, wait, wait... the weirdest thing. The Year parameter is the second parameter of this report. And its grayed out (with no value) UNTIL I select the first parameter (im my case "category"). Am I somehow telling the Year param to do this? or does SSRS 2005 process the params in order? I don't think I ever noticed this before.
UPDATE 2:
Please see all comments
=DateTime.Today.Year
should work as well.
Edit: Bruno - i have the same behavior as you are seeing. I created a sample report with a string first parameter with no default value, and a string 2nd parameter with a default of =DateTime.Today.Year. When I have the one with the default as the 2nd parameter in the order, it shows up empty and disabled.
I was able to fix this problem 2 ways: first by adding a default of =String.Empty to my first parameter, and the second way was to just change the order of the parameters.
Not sure if this behavior is by design or a bug - but like you said, I hadn't noticed it either until today when you pointed it out in your question.
Try:
=Year(Now)
I'm not sure if this is what you need, but it worked for me. I used it to form a date string so I used =Year(Now).ToString().
SSRS does process the report parameters in order - order can be important if you have dependencies between your parameters.
From MSDN: "Parameter order is
important when you have cascading
parameters, or when you want to show
users the default value for one
parameter before they choose values
for other parameters."
So, it will always wait until you have a default value for your first parameter or you enter the first parameter's value, before it processes the next one, and so on.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281392.aspx
I found the by making sure that ALL of my parameters had at least some default value, then you will not experience they greyed out datetime picker. So, every parameter before your datetime paremeter in order needs to have a (default) value or it will not work.
Def due to order of evaluation of parameters.
Simple workaround ; in the parameters tab you can change the order of the parameters - this will move the date pickers to the top of the list and are then enabled straight away, on my server at least.
Someone raised the issue of basing a date filter on a queried default value - if you do this, you will notice a very annoying knock-on effect of getting screen refresh any time the dates get changed, before you have a chance to requery the reports.

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