Robelle updates Suprtool for more Y2K work

Newest version of 3000 utility selects and sorts on date ranges

Robelle Consulting (604.582.1700) is shipping the 4.2 version of Suprtool, adding features for Year 2000 maintenance and support for the IMAGE/SQL b-trees and larger master datasets.

HP 3000 sites running applications that have have dates with two-digit years will now be able to use Suprtool’s new $stddate function to select and manipulate records as if the dates had four-digit years. The new function uses date windowing that can be specified either globally or per task to decide which century the two-digit year is in.

Windowing is a programming technique becoming popular as a way to repair applications temporarily for Year 2000 use — when time to rewrite them isn’t available, according to Robelle’s Neil Armstrong.
“This feature is there for those people who thought they were ready for Y2K and learn at the last minute they can’t rewrite their application,” he said. “They need to window somehow, and this is available to make the data window-able.”

This latest version is the one Robelle recommends its customers install before year-end, both for its new features and in preparation for any last-minute Year 2000 patches that may arise. Robelle has certified that Suprtool versions 4.1.01 and greater are Year 2000-compliant, but only when processing dates that include the century.

The newest Suprtool feature leverages some of the technology that Robelle introduced with its SmartDate product in 1997. SmartDate is a set of conversion routines that works with COBOL, C or Pascal code to change applications to support dates in the 21st Century. The routines manipulate and calculate dates by having applications call a common component to do the conversions between more than two dozen date formats and find calculations like the number of days between two dates.

Using $stddate, Suprtool can employ If and Extract commands with the new function to convert any date format to one with four digits years in a double-integer date container. Suprtool changes the formats to a CCYYMMDD format. In the If command it is used for selecting records based on date criteria. In the Extract command it is used for converting dates to the standard ccyymmdd format.

For example, the following commands in Suprtool could be used to change a six-digit date (invoice-date) to an eight-digit date:

> get invoice-detail
> set date cutoff 30
> item invoice-date,date,yymmdd
> if not $invalid(invoice-date)
> update
> extract invoice-date = $stddate(invoice-date)
> xeq

Using the new feature means that Suprtool “will look at the value of cutoff, determine if it’s 2000 or 1900, and then it will expand that date internally and evaluate against some other date.” Suprtool’s 4.0 release introduced some new command-parsing features that let programmers control how Suprtool parses the year component in the $date function. “You can either use two-digit years by applying a cutoff rule, or you can force all years into a four-digit format,” Armstrong said.
When $stddate converts a century-free date format to ccyymmdd, it needs to decide what century to add. This is determined by the Set Date Cutoff command, which defines the starting year of a 100-year date window.

The product also supports seven new date formats: aamm, mmddaa, ddmmaa, mmyyyy, yyddd, ccyyddd and HPCalendar. Robelle has also improved the If and Extract commands to support for the mod arithmetic operator, one which enables extraction on any portion of a numeric field.

Robelle has stretched the comparison capabilities of Suprtool as well. It now does less-than and greater-than comparisons on non-collating dates. In previous versions Suprtool refused to permit less-than and greater-than comparisons of dates that were not stored in natural sorting order. For example, ddmmyy and mmddyy dates were specifically excluded.

Suprtool 4.2 also supports the latest enhancements to IMAGE/SQL. The product now works with HP’s b-tree indexes. It also supports the expanded master datasets in IMAGE/SQL which have been available since the PowerPatch 4 release of MPE/iX 5.5. These master datasets can now be as large as 80 Gb, double their previous size.

Robelle customers on current support will automatically receive the upgraded version of the software at no extra charge. The software costs $4,000, which includes the first year of maintenance. Additional licenses are $2,000 each, and maintenance is $800 per year.