Storing/retrieving dates in TextBoxes

Getting Started
1

OK, something I thought would be straight forward is giving me the run-around.

Dates.

So, one part of my application stores the current date+time in a textbox like this:

DIM d as New Date TextBox1.Text = d.SQLDateTime
And another part of my application needs to read in that information (at a later stage) and compare it with another date+time stored in the same way, in a different text box:

DIM CurrentDate as Date DIM converted as Boolean converted = ParseDate(TextBox1.Text, CurrentDate) Label1.Text = Str(CurrentDate)
The moment I run this bit of code, the debugger kicks in and tells me that CurrentDate is “nil” and that converted is “False”.

I could be doing something really stupid here, but I kinda thought that if I stored a SQLDateTime in a textbox that I would be able to retrieve this information from the text box and convert it back into a date with relative ease. I would prefer to use dates (and SQLDates so there’s always a consistent formatting) instead of messing around manually parsing the text to figure out which bit is the year, month, day, hour, minute & second.

What am I doing wrong?

2 
Dim  CurrentDate as new Date

is what you want.

For the next step consider saving your original date in a property which then can be accessed directly. And the step afterward should consider either saving the data to a central location or broadcasting it from the first location to the second one. Just mentioning this when your app is growing.

3

AFAIK, parseDate does not work with SQLDate(Time). Rather than using parseDate, you could instantiate a new date object and assign the value:

Dim CurrentDate as new Date CurrentDate.SQLDateTime=TextBox1.Text
However, I’d strongly second Beatrix’s suggestion to store the value in a window property instead of (or in addition to) the control:

[code]self.mTheDate= new Date
TextBox1.Text = mTheDate.SQLDateTime

…

Dim CurrentDate as new Date
CurrentDate.SQLDateTime=mTheDate
[/code]

4

I posted a control that I created here: https://forum.xojo.com/28381-textfield-for-dates/p1#p233785

It might work for you. It’s not crazy complicated…