In another thread, Erika wrote:
Quote:


Hi Erika!

I remember you mentioning this at the conference, and I made a note that it was important to me, but I've forgotten just how and in what instances Piping should be used.  Can you explain its use in a bit more detail?

Is it just for date calculations?  Should I place pipes around all my date manipulations (and by all I mean form programming as well as report programming)?  Would it serve any purpose in a programming calculation such as:

Invoice_Age = @ToNumber(@Date) - @ToNumber(Invoice_Date) 

or a report calculation such as:

Var MonthTotal as Double
MonthTotal = @ToMoney(@XLookup("MonthTotals.db", @Year(@Date) - 1, "Year", @Month$(@Date)))
Last_Year = "Last year's total for " + @Month$(@Date) + " was:  $" + @STR(MonthTotal) 

Or is it just for retrieve specs?  Here's one I use to retrieve this month's invoices:

{@Year(Invoice_Date) = @Year(@Date) AND @Month(Invoice_Date) = @Month(@Date)} 

How would piping be used on that?  Is it as simple as replacing the curly braces?

Thanks!

Quote:

You can't use the pipe for this because it refers to a record value - Invoice_Date. I believe there is a way to construct a retrieve that will work. I'm not where I can test though. I'll try to post it later.

Holy guacamole, what the heck is that?  But hey, it works.  Can you explain it to me?  And where should I put the "-1" for 1) Last month's and 2) last year's.

Thanks Ray!

@Right("00" + @Str(@Month(@Date)), 2) pads the month number out to two places. A date is stored as YYYY/MM/DD, where MM is the month. For September it is stored as 09 but @Month simply returns 9 so we need the other zero before it, so that the retrieve works.

Last month is tricky as last month may have been December and subtracting 1 from 1 does not give you 12 nor does it give you the right year. It's gonna be a tricky statement.

-Ray

Explanation:

] <-This character makes it a string search instead of a date search

|@Year(@Date)| <- This gets the current year

/ <-This inserts a slash into the criteria

|@Right("00" + @Str(@Month(@Date)), 2)| <-This gets the month number padded to two numbers as described above

/.. <-This inserts a slash and then dot dot for any day in that month

So what you end up with(If you look at it after the compiler) is

]2007/09/..

-Ray

For all of last year it would be

]|@Year(@Date)-1|/.. 

-Ray

I've been having fun with these; I've crashed Sesame 4 times because I've put the math in the wrong places.  But when the smoke cleared:

This month last year

]|(@Year(@Date-@DOM(@Date))-1)|/|@Right("00" + @Str(@Month(@Date)), 2)|/..   

Last month last year

]|(@Year(@Date-@DOM(@Date))-1)|/|@Right("00" + @Str(@Month(@Date-@DOM(@Date))), 2)|/..   

I now have a nice little library of programmed retrieves that make use of piping and are not tied to an element.  Thanks Ray and Erika!

Well, one is already posted above as something not to do.  I'll mail the others.