There are lots of places where formats are hardcoded
in to_char() calls, so as initially discussed in
this thread. I
grepped through the toolkit for such format strings to find the most
commonly used. Below is a list of the results with an occurence
greater than 5. The only thing that can be said by looking at the
results is that currently the toolkit uses a wild mixture of format
strings ...
It would be a step towards internationalization if we had some
centrally defined pl/sql functions that do that formatting instead of
using to_char(), so I'd like to suggest to introduce the following
ones:
acs_dt__time (just the time, e.g. "6:00 PM")
acs_dt__date (just a date, e.g. "12/31/2002")
acs_dt__date_long (date in longer format, like "December 31, 2002")
acs_dt__datetime - both date and time
acs_dt__datetime_long - both date and time in a longer format
Is that sufficient?
I think acs-datetime is the right place to add this stuff, but then
this package would have to be made part of the always required
packages.
Also what would be the best approach to allow for changing locales per
request? So that it can be set up in a way that on the same server
acs_dt__date(some_date) produces "31.12.2002" for a german user and
"12/31/2002" for an english speaking user?
The only solution I can currently think of is to add a second
parameter that passes the request's locale down to the pl/sql
level. That would make a .tcl page with a query look like this:
set locale [ad_some_yet_to_write_locale_function]
db_1row getdate {
select acs_dt__date(some_date, :locale) from bla
}
Looks a bit tedious to me. Any better solutions?
List of grep results follows.
{YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS} 86
yyyy-mm-dd 55
YYYY 46
HH24:MI 42
{Month DD, YYYY} 38
{Mon. DD, YYYY} 35
{MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI} 19
HH:MIpm 18
{MM/DD/YY HH:MI AM} 18
{Mon DD, YYYY} 16
YYYY-MM-DD 15
MM/DD/YYYY 13
HH24 13
J 12
Q 12
{YYYY MM DD HH24 MI SS} 11
MM-DD-YYYY 11
YYYYMM 11
{Mon DD} 9
{HH24:MI:SS Mon DD, YYYY} 7
{MM-DD-YYYY HH12:MI:AM} 6
{HH24:MI, Mon DD, YYYY} 6
mm/dd/yyyy 6
{Mon fmDDfm, YYYY HH24:MI:SS} 6
{MM/DD HH24} 6
{Month DD, YYYY HH:Mi am} 6
hh24:mi:ss 6
{yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss} 6
{Month DD, YYYY HH:MI:SS} 6
{Day Month DD, YYYY} 6
YYYYMMDD 6
MMDDYY 6
{Mon DD, YYYY HH:MI:SS PM} 6
9999.9 6
{YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI} 6
fmMM/DDfm/YYYY 6
{MM/DD/YY hh12:Mi am} 6
