Question

I am at the liberty of a certain database, which stores date values as integers (i.e. 20121119). I have several queries that retrieve these values for reporting displays, so I need to convert these values to m/d/yyyy format.

I see several ways to do this:

• Do the conversion in the display, using an existing global UDF. The drawback here, is that if the query is re-used, I need to duplicate the code necessary to convert the display value.
• Parse the value in the SQL to return a properly formatted value. I’m reading from a DB2/iSeries, which does not (as far as I have found) have a built-in function for this.

• Loop over the result set and convert each value one at a time. This is what I am currently doing, however for larger data-sets, performance is an issue:

  <cfscript>
      var i = 1;
      var _query = ARGUMENTS.query;
  
      if  (   !Len(Trim(ARGUMENTS.column))
          ||  !ListFindNoCase(_query.ColumnList, ARGUMENTS.column))
          return _query;
  
      for (i=1; i<=_query.RecordCount; i++) {
          _query[ARGUMENTS.column][i] =
              VARIABLES.Library.DateTime.ParseAS400Date(
                  _query[ARGUMENTS.column][i]
                  );
      }
  
      return _query;
  </cfscript>
  

Is there an easy/quick way to apply a formatting function to an entire column in a ColdFusion query object?

Answer 1

As noted by @Dan, there is a built-in function that will convert a string to a timestamp representation. Since you have an int, then it would be something like this:

SELECT VARCHAR_FORMAT(TIMESTAMP_FORMAT(CAST(20121119 AS CHAR(8)), 'YYYYMMDD'), 'MM/DD/YYYY')
FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1