Uniplex and the Year 2000

The newly released Uniplex V9.00 is fully Year 2000 compliant out of the box. This includes full support for 4 digit year numbers across the board, including Word Processor, Mail, Spreadsheet and Database.

If Year 2000 compliance is vital for you, then you should move to V9.00.

If you use Informix database tools alongside Uniplex, then you will need to upgrade your Informix tools to be Year 2000 compliant also. (If you only use Uniplex tools then this is not an issue).

Uniplex V8.10 is nearly Year 2000 compliant, however there are some changes that you need to be aware of in order to ensure trouble free running into the 21st century.

Firstly, there are two components which don't work in past 2000, udate - which inserts dates into documents, and card index.

Udate replaces $DATE in documents with the print date, this won't work correctly and needs to be replaced with your Unix date command. There are a number of places where this is used:

UAP/cmds/pprint and scrprint
UAP/ufill/usrc/index, print, sprint and wprint

Where you may have had a line such as: DT=`udate "+%d +%h 19%y"`
This now becomes
DT=`date "+%d +%h +%Y"`

Card Index just simply doesn't handle 2000+ date fields. None of the vanilla Uniplex card index files use the date field, but if your own application does then you really little choice but to move to using a database instead.

Configuration Changes

To ensure that Uniplex is configured for Year 2000 you must make changes to the UAP/uniplex.sys file. Specifically you need to modify or add the fields:

DATEMODE="C41DQF"
DATEFMT="DD/MM/YYYY"

This will need to be recompiled using syscomp. Be aware that individual users files will need replacing (see earlier Newsline issues on preserving user entries in this case).

This is described more fully in the V8.10 online technical guide.

Year 2000 and the Uniplex Database

Usql can contain either 2-digit or 4-digit dates, but be warned, if only 2 digits are entered then the database will accept this always as a 1900 date. The good news is that it will not accept "00" as the year, so you should be able to spot any bad entries.

Uform, for database screen forms, will handle 4-digit dates, but you may need to modify existing screens to accommodate the extra length of fields.

The database switches to 4-digits when the 'DQ' flags are set in DATEFMT.

Ufill, the screen builder, like Uform, will need any existing screens modified to allow the extra length dates to be entered. This is controlled by the 'F' flag in DATEFMT.

Note, that you will need to check both the screen template section and the commands section to ensure that any date fields are handled correctly by the commands programs - which may be external to Uniplex.

Mail and Calendar Dates

Both Mail and Time Manager will show only 2-digit dates. After all, the context is usually pretty obvious (unless you have some very old e-mail)!

Internally these dates are held correctly.

Version 7.00

Version 7.00 will mostly conform, and the changes mostly apply. The key V7 failure is in the spreadsheet, which does not successfully handle Year 2000 until V8.00.

You may also experience some problems with the database, depending upon which version and machine port you have. Call the support hot-line if you need further information.