InfoPath Dev

Hi folks,

Here is the Problem.

I have a Date Control which needs to accept valid date from the user.I am validating date's using Regular expression.

The following is the Regular expression used -> \d{4}-\d{1,2}-\d{1,2}
The display format used is mm/dd/yyyy .

It work fine in all scenarion's except for one scenario.
When '02/31/2005' is entered, NO error message is displayed and
Date is auto changed to '3/3/2005'.

I even tried to validate this through custom script but before the scripting code is fired the '02/31/2005' input is changed to '3/3/2005' and the validation code Won't return any error since '3/3/2005' is a valid date.


Is there any way we can validate for '02/31/2005' in Infopath either through use of RegEx or through any other means ?

Is this a known bug with Infopath?



Regards,
Amish

Amish

Hi Amish,

Looks like you found a good bug in InfoPath. :)

I sent e-mail to the InfoPath team, but my guess is that this is pretty low priority and it may make sense to process this way for other reasons (which I am unaware of).

Good find!

Microsoft responded:

Cause there is no 2/31, ever? Really, cause it#%92s three days beyond the last date. You might see other behavior for 2/40. But specifically, we use Windows APIs to parse the dates, and 3/3/2005 is the value it returns when the user types in 2/31.

More info from MS:

A little more detail on how this is stored internally.

The programming language stores the date as an integer relative to some arbitrary past date (something like January 1, 1976). The friendly representation is according to a serialization and deserialization scheme.

The serialization schema is roughly (YYYY-1976)*366+MM*30+DD. I say roughly because it#%92s actually a more complicated case statement that takes varying month days into account and leap years in the February case.

The deserialization is similar.

So, when 2/31/2005 is serialized it#%92s actually something like 63351 (random number) which then gets deserialized to 3/3/2005.

One more from MS (with feeling):

You could probably make a case that this is a bug because there is no such thing as Feb 31 and we should parse this correctly before we serialize it. For example, if I meant to type 3/31, but typed 2/31 instead, I won#%92t get an error and will probably be surprised later when I get 3/3 instead of 3/31.

Note: is the behavior of the Windows date parsing code (NLS), and the behavior will occur in many different applications.

Hi Patrick,
Thanks a lot for ur prompt reply.:-)))



Amish

One of my InfoPath forms has a requirement for very robust and complete validation to include leap year checking and last date in month checking. From reading this thread it seems to me that instead of using the date picker control I will need to use a simple text box and do data validation using some pattern matching. Am I interpreting the information in this thread correctly? Thanks.



Richard T. Henry
Lewisberry, PA, USA
riphenry@gmail.com

I would suggest using the Date picker control and having some onBeforeChange validator code.

Shanthi
InfoPathDev India

 i used this for date validation -> \d{4}-\d{1,2}-\d{1,2}
The display format used is mm/dd/yyyy .i too face same issue what faced I even tried to validate this through custom script but before the scripting code is fired the '02/31/2005' input is changed to '3/3/2005' and the validation code Won't return any error since '3/3/2005' is a valid date. did get any solution for this. if u get, please tell

 

Check this out! This may help someone. http://praveenbattula.blogspot.com/2011/01/date-validation-in-infopath-forms.html