Planned feature deprecation for next major release...

[David H.]

I read in the planned feature depreciation section of the v2.50 announcement, see https://4js.com/en/news/products/2013/announcing-genero-250-general-availability, that you plan to depreciate the C API functions. This is worrying as we use some of those functions (examples being dtcvfmtasc() and dttofmtasc()) to give us functionality that is not currently available in BDL... Are there some plans to offer us a way forward when this new version eventually appears? 

[Sebastien F.]

Hello David,
Could you please describe your complete environment? Platforms, databases ...
And why do you use C Extensions, what kind of things you do in C?
Thanks,
Seb

[David H.]

Hi Seb.

Platform wise we are windows only. Database wise its currently Informix and Oracle, with plans to potentially add SQL Server at some point in the future.

The main functions we use the API for are to give us full control over the format of a datetime (datetime -> string and string -> datetime). These are primarily used in file input/output routines (ASCII, XML, etc) so just about any format of a datetime can be accommodated by just setting up the appropriate mask in a configuration file. I think we also use rdefmtdate() for string -> date conversions with a format mask...

[Sebastien F.]

So you would not need to write your own C extensions if Genero would support DATETIME formatting functions natively?
Sounds a bit weird that we advertise "return to simplicity", when I see what you have to do.
Seb

[David H.]

Yes pretty much, I think we would need:-

1. Convert string to datetime with a formatting mask.
2. Convert datetime to a string with a formatting mask.
3. Convert string to a date with a formatting mask.

BDL is quite good at datatype -> string but not so good at string -> datatype..

I think I'm correct in saying none of the above can be done via built in BDL functionality currently. I agree that having to write our own low level functions to support any format is not really my definition of "return to simplicity" !

Best wishes for Xmas and the New Year to you and the rest of Four Js team.

D.