Date-Time Conversion Utility

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Introduction

Lately I've had to do a lot of work with CTime and COleDateTime object variables. They're pretty nice classes to work with but not when you're debugging and need to know their actual date-time values. The CTime class stores its value in a time_t member variable and COleDateTime uses the DATE type to keep its value. Unfortunately when we need to know what they mean in human-readable format, such as 11/03/1999 14:08:56, it's not possible without explicitly writing some code to format them into a string. Well, I got tired of writing such code so instead I wrote a little application where I could input the value I need to figure out and then have it converted at the click of a button. The application is called DTConverter and its a simple MFC dialog-based application that allows you to convert to and from a time_t, a DATE, or a regular string in %m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S format.

I hope it makes debugging your date-time objects less painful. Enjoy it!

Update by Geert Delmeiren

I use COleDateTimeSpan variables. These are also non-human readable, so I extended the utility for converting COleDateTimeSpans also.

For converting a variable a couple of mouse clicks are needed:

1. Ctrl-C to copy the variable's value
2. Click on the utility's session in the task bar
3. Click in the edit field you want to paste
4. Ctrl-V to paste the value
5. Click on the button to convert the value

That could be quicker! So I extended the utility with (configurable) auto-paste/auto-convert functionality. In the fully automatic mode steps 3) to 5) are obsolete. You just copy the value and activate the utility and... there's the result!

Another small change: The human readable date/time string now uses the format specified in the regional settings.

History

22 Sep 2001 - added 'Always on Top' and disabling GUI logic to the dialogs.

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