Date, time and money

The sample from my last post did not show all the table column data because it only understood integers and strings. If you look at the "Orders" table schema you will see datetime and currency columns. Let's look at these types in a bit more detail

datetime

The datetime type is identified by the DBTYPE_DBTIMESTAMP data type identifier and is implemented by the DBTIMESTAMP structure. As you can see from its definition, this is a very simple structure and the revised sample application merely uses it to display the date part as a string. If you want to manipulate the date and time values, I advise you to use the MFC/ATL shared COleDateTime class (it's very easy to convert between the two).

currency

The currency type is identified by the DBTYPE_CY data type identifier and is implemented as the well-known CY or CURRENCY structure. It's essentially an __int64 that represents decimal values scaled by 10,000 so that it has four decimal digits. To manage this data type, and especially to render it as a string, I created the new CCurrency class (not under the OLEDBCLI namespace because this represents a more general Windows data type). The string formatting method (named Format) takes two parameters:

1. The numeric format of the value: None, Number or Currency. The first format returns the number as it is internally formatted, with trailing zeores and a decimal point (locale-insensitive). The second format returns the value as a number in the given locale and the third does the same but as a currency.
2. The locale identifier (see above).

You can also use this class to perform some basic arithmetic with currency values (although I have not tested it extensively). 

I will be addressing other OLE DB types as we meet them, but for the next post I will show you a very interesting and useful feature of base table (and scrollable) cursors: bookmarks.