Freeside:1.7:Documentation:Dates

Introduction

Freeside stores most dates as "Unix time" - the number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on the morning of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds.

Conversion in Perl

• Conversion from UNIX time: see the localtime function or the Date::Format module.

• Conversion to UNIX time: see the Date::Parse or Time::Local modules, among others.

Conversion in PostgreSQL

• Conversion from UNIX time (substitute in your own time zone, date field and output field name):

'epoch'::TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE AT TIME ZONE 'PST' + _date_field * '1 second'::INTERVAL AS output_fieldname

• Converstion to UNIX time:

EXTRACT( EPOCH FROM date_column )

Conversion in MySQL

• Conversion to UNIX time:

UNIX_TIMESTAMP( date_column )

Conversion in Crystal Reports

• Download the U2lwin32 user function library
• Use the provided "EpochToDateTime" function
• Works with Crystal Reports 11 by manually installing the U2lwin32.dll to Business Objects\Common\3.5\bin