Update Re NotesDateTime

Yesterday's article about NotesDateTime and International date formats may only be partially correct.

YYYY/MM/DD format definitely works in the string argument for New NotesDateTime() if your computer and Notes client are both set up for the American English MM/DD/YY default, but Manrfred Dillaman reports that he updated his madicon RSS Reader code to use this technique, and now it fails on systems with the European standard DD/MM/YY configuration. The failure has the same characteristic as what was previously observed on US-configured systems when Manfred's code was supplying DD/MM/YY.... the dates are correct if the day number is 13 or greater, but incorrect if the day number is 12 or less.

The concluding paragraph of the article, which stated that the best practice was to use the NotesInternational class to find out the correct format for the date string in order to construct the date string argument for New NotesDateTime(), is not just the best way to go. It appears to really the only way to go. It's interesting that the NotesDateTime class is trying to be intelligent with "impossible" dates, but it's disappointing that it is not intelligent enough to know that YYYY/DD/MM is never a correct format for dates.

(Now, watch. Somewhere in the world, there's probably a small group of people who do in fact use YYYY/DD/MM, and I'll hear about it in the comments, won't I. I've had twenty plus years of experience in the software biz, including several years as a software localization specialist, and I've read countless articles and manuals covering international date and time formats (amongst many other things), and I've never heard of anyone who uses YYYY/DD/MM format, but now that I've published an article, someone somewhere is going to have been offended by it..)