ECMap lets you use a variety of date formats, including both 6-digit and 8-digit dates. Most software applications now require dates with 4-digit years, but many older applications still have date fields with 2-digit years. As a result, you may find yourself mapping a 6-digit date field to an 8-digit date field. ECMap provides a utility to take care of such situations.
ECMap includes century logic to update date formats on a field-specific basis or globally. This century logic is available when you are defining date fields in application files and when you are defining memory variables as date fields. In each case, you specify a field century minimum or a global century minimum that is used to convert 6-digit dates to 8-digit dates. You choose a specific year as the century minimum, and ECMap uses this year to determine whether a 2-digit year belongs to the 20th century or to the 21st century. Every 2-digit year greater than the year you specify as the century minimum is considered 20th century; for instance, the 1900s. Every year that is less than or equal to the century minimum is considered 21st century; for instance the 2000s.
For example, if you specify your century minimum as 40:
The year 10 changes to 2010
The year 39 changes to 2039
The year 40 changes to 2040
The year 41 changes to 1941
The year 60 changes to 1960
ECMap also includes a general utility that applies the same century logic globally. When you use this utility, ECMap automatically updates the date format of any 6-digit date fields when they are mapped to 8-digit date fields. You can choose to apply a global century minimum to all data fields or only those for which you have not set a field century minimum.
