Date issue while upgrading to CL 5.6 r2

[Craig Weldy]

I have run into an issue while testing my translates for an upgrade from CL 5.3 r1 on AIX 5.2  to CL 5.6 r2 on AIX 5.3.  I have spoken with healthvision support but have not gotten an answer that works for me.  Thought I would throw it out here and see what everyone else has found.

My problem is with fields that are defigned as TS – Time Stamp fields in my variants.  In 5.3 if an inbound message contained only a portion of the field then cloverleaf would fill in the rest so that the outbound message would be a fully formed Time stamp complete with Time zone info.  What I have found with 5.6 is that it will pass through exactly what comes in and will not add anything to it.  I have ruled out any posibility that dates are being modified in scripts.

Below are a few examples of what I am finding:

 Inbound data            CL 5.3 outbound                       CL 5.6 outbound

 20080714155600      20070714155600.0000-0400      20080714155600

 200807141605          20080714160500.0000-0400      200807141605

 20080715                  20080715xxxxxx.0000-0400       20080715

                                (xxxxxx = current system time

                                 when message was processed)

Healthvision support said to click on the default timestamp precision in the client preferences of the IDE options.  I did this and cycled my entire site, but it had no effect on what I was seeing.  The next advise was that I needed to add the DATECOPYOPT to each of my xlates.  I am looking at this option to see if that will work for me given the number of xlates involved.

I am still testing to see if the receiving systems even have a problem with not receiving a full timestamp field so I am not really sure that it is a major issue for me, but I would really like to have a better idea of why I am seeing this difference in functionality.  

Has anyone else seen this behavior?  Is there something that I have missed in my setup?  Was this functionality changed for a reason and I just didn’t notice it in the release notes?

Thanks for any insight you can provide!

Craig Weldy
Senior Interface Analyst
Beacon Health System
South Bend, In, 46615

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Craig,

I think in Cloverleaf(R) 5.6 they changed the default Date handling to never include precision. So where you want precision, it appears you will now have to do the DATECOPYOPT and click on the ‘Add Precision’.

However, I am not sure that will address all of your problem – it is worth a try with one Xlate (you only need to place the DATECOPYOPT once at the beginning of the Xlate) and see if the issue gets resolved.

A question I have for you is are you populating those fields via BULKCOPY, PATHCOPY, or COPY?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Craig Weldy]

Jim,  thanks for the Post.  Through talking to Cloverleaf support, I figured out that just setting the property they told me about dosn’t turn on the precision.  Like you said, you have to put a DATECOPYOPT at the beginning of every xlate.

I put one in all of my xlates in the 5.6 environment (over 350, thank goodness for perl).  I then reran my side by side tests and it diffed out perfectly.

It may have been in the release notes and I just wasn’t paying close attention.  My bad!  But everything is super now.

Craig Weldy
Senior Interface Analyst
Beacon Health System
South Bend, In, 46615

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