Using Timestamps as Unique Keys

August 14, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hey, Ted:

In response to your article in the July 17 Midrange Guru, OS/400 Edition, the short answer is this: You can’t get there from here.

I posed this same question to IBM several months back and got some ridiculous suggestion about writing a record to a dummy file with a timestamp in it, then read it back and use the timestamp of that record. Huh?

I ended up using the QWCCVTDT API. This API will return the time to milliseconds. This was close enough.

I was disappointed to discover that there is no way to populate the entire time field with a simple op code. Too bad.

I believe there is a way to get the entire TimeStamp by jumping through some hoops using C functions.

— Abe

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