If We Took a Holiday, AS/400-Style
As part of the date conversion process, IT managers and
developers may need to calibrate systems activities for time spans well into the future. For example, systems may need to be pre-programmed for actual business days, rather than weekends and holidays.
To automate this calendaring process in AS/400 environments, Inpro International (Dallas) has begun shipping a tool that gives users the ability to retrieve from a single API a variety of date formats and calendars all the way up to the Year 3000.
The latest version CAL/2000 includes multiple calendar support, enabling users to select from multiple calendars serving multiple divisions or countries. CAL/2000 now also includes workday support to its calendaring functions. Date math can now be done in terms of workdays -- as opposed to overall calendar days -- which can be configured by business or country standards.
CAL/2000 handles date with about one-tenth the overhead of IBM's CVTDAT and day of week calculation, claims Craig VanHorne, president and CEO of Inpro. The tool works with date conversion tools such as Into2000 and Aldon CMS. Potential information calculated includes "work dates and holidays by country, and about 114 other fields about a date," VanHorne explains. "Everything you could ever want to do with a date is returned in one call. We've done all the math ahead of time, so we're retrieving information already computed."
Inpro also announced a new version of a companion product, TT/400 (TestTime/400), a Year/2000 date simulation and testing utility. TT/400 can be used in conjunction with CAL/2000, says VanHorne. "If you're testing out to 2012, TT/400 will look for a calendaring tool in your systems such as CAL/2000, then go out there with times and dates to roll forward for test users."