One of the first things I wrote about on codestore was a way to work out what format a Domino server expected dates in. Should they be mm/dd or dd/mm?

The code was a very simple one-liner of @Formula, which I've used in just about every application I've worked on since. You can see I've used it in the DEXT JavaScript object too (about 10 lines in).

What about when you want to do the same thing but from LotusScript? Not something I'd needed to do until last week when I was extending ('scuse the pun) the Ext.nd application by adding a date format property to it's base "session" Agent.

What I thought would be a case of multiple if statements turned out to be another one-liner after I learnt of the the Datenumber() function and used it in conjunction with "my" array-less Replace() shortcut. Here's the code:

Print |Ext.nd.DATE_FORMAT = "| + 
                Replace(Cstr(Datenumber(1948, 12, 31)),
                        Split("31/12/1948", "/"),
                        Split("d/m/Y","/")
                )  
        +|";|

There's nothing more satisfying then solving a problem in one line of code. Yeah, I know it's on six lines. I did that to make it presentable.

The results is the following on my local, UK-based servers:

Or the following when I replicate the database to this site's server, which is in America:

Whether it's of use or not at least it's an introduction (for some of us at least) to the DateNumber() function, which I'd never seen before.

Then I got thinking about how to improve on it, as I can't work out if it's truly global or not. I know it works if the server uses / as the date separator, but I can only assume it works with "." or other variations. Can't see why it wouldn't though.

While messing about with this I was looking in the help files and discovered something else. Notes has an "International" class. Using that we could see what the server's date separator is. Not only that but it already has a property to tell us whether the server is MDY or DMY.

We could use it to write a function like this:

Function GetDateFormat() As String
        Dim international As NotesInternational
        Set international = session.International
        Dim BaseFormat as String

        If international.IsDateDMY Then
                BaseFormat = "d/m/Y"
        Elseif international.IsDateMDY Then
                BaseFormat = "m/d/Y"
        Elseif international.IsDateYMD Then
                BaseFormat = "Y/m/d"
        Else 'default
                BaseFormat = "d/m/Y"
        End If

        GetDateFormat = Join( Split(BaseFormat, "/"), international.DateSep)
End Function

Although that's a lot of code isn't. I much prefer the one-liner, don't you?