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Hi,

I have an application with a vb6 client that talks to a java server and
passes XML back and forward, and I'm wondering what's the best format to
transfer date/time values between them in an XML attribute.

my first thougtht was to use RFC822 date/time format because I can produce
and consume those with javamail's MailDateFormat, but I can't find code to
do that for VB (well, I found one module on vbrad.com but it wouldn't parse
the dates created by MailDateFormat)

I really hate reinventing the wheel - does anyone know of a date/time format
that can be used with minimal fuss and maximum portability, with free code
available for both java and vb

Andy

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 09:34:24 GMT, "Andy Fish"
<> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have an application with a vb6 client that talks to a java server and
>passes XML back and forward, and I'm wondering what's the best format to
>transfer date/time values between them in an XML attribute.
>
>my first thougtht was to use RFC822 date/time format because I can produce
>and consume those with javamail's MailDateFormat, but I can't find code to
>do that for VB (well, I found one module on vbrad.com but it wouldn't parse
>the dates created by MailDateFormat)
>
>I really hate reinventing the wheel - does anyone know of a date/time format
>that can be used with minimal fuss and maximum portability, with free code
>available for both java and vb

I don't know about Java but ...

I would definitely opt for : yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss (24 hour)

Have a look at VB's Format() command

For decoding I strongly recommend that you do it yourself using Mid$()
and Val()
- then make a Date (8 byte IEEE) using DateSerial and TimeSerial

VB is far too clever at decoding a Date String
- it is also 'locale' aware

"Andy Fish" <> wrote in message
news:AIUEb.1645$...
> Hi,
>
> I have an application with a vb6 client that talks to a java server
and
> passes XML back and forward, and I'm wondering what's the best format
to
> transfer date/time values between them in an XML attribute.
>

This is some poop out of MSDN on XML data types. It is from Microsoft,
but it at least has the appearance of being universal and not system
specific. I would think most XML parsers would process these correctly.

<Schema name="myschema"
xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-comml-data"
xmlns:dt="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:datatypes">
</Schema>

XML Data Types:

date: Date in a subset ISO 8601 format, without the time data. For
example: "1994-11-05".

dateTime: Date in a subset of ISO 8601 format, with optional time and no
optional zone. For example, "1988-04-07T18:39:09".

dateTime.tz: Date in a subset ISO 8601 format, with optional time and
optional zone. For example: 1988-04-07T18:39:09-08:00".