TIME() vs DATE() (AREV Specific) [Revelation On-Line Wiki]

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At 28 MAR 2001 01:36:28PM Peter Dunlap wrote:

AREV Specific

Does AREV 3.12 (on Novell 5.0 with NLM) use a different access method for it's DATE() function than it's TIME() function?

After several days of operation my RBASIC scheduler application becomes confused regarding the current date. The symptom manifests itself upto 5 minutes (so far) before midnight. Durring this pre-midnight zone, the date is being erroniously reported by the AREV DATE() function, as the next day. This misleads the scheduler into re-launching it's programs and making false log entries.

I can duplicate this problem by allowing a test to run for several days. The durration before the problem occurs appears to be shorter on faster machines (e.g. 1 GHZ Pentium III's).

At 28 MAR 2001 02:57PM Dave Bennett wrote:

Is the Arev time insink with the computer time? Are you using Server Time?

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At 28 MAR 2001 04:05PM Peter Dunlap wrote:

After several days running… probably not. Does AREV get the date from the network and it's time from somewhere else?

At 29 MAR 2001 09:15AM [url=http://www.sprezzatura.com]The Sprezzatura Group[/url] wrote:

AREV gets its date and time from the operating system of the workstation, using standard DOS calls.

In many systems we have seen delay code which has a bug where it activates after a period (say 5 minutes) and the system looks for TIME()+(5*60) but doesn't test for a result ] 86400. So around midnight the test fails.

Often it is better in delay code to use (DATE() * 86400) + TIME() as an absolute time index.

You may simply have a standard error slipping into the date as a result of the PC speed. Many Pentium 4's run at 1+ GHz - there are not many Pentium 3's in this speed class. The Intel site has a utility to check if your PC is overclocked.

But then again, let's just blame Microsoft - who have recently implemented Microsoft Time as a new Windows standard. Especially -

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q189/7/06.ASP

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q229/7/59.asp

You can always use this SYNCTIME routine to synchronize the workstation date and time with the Novell Server. If you prefer, the Novell supplied utility SYSTIME.EXE also achieves a server-workstation time synchronization. This should reset the DOS date supplied to AREV and solve your problem. Call SYNCTIME ahead of each DATE() and TIME() call.

The Sprezzatura Group

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