Pan X making assumptions that Pan 6 didn't

Panorama X
1

I inherited the Panorama system I work with over 15 years ago (when it was Pan 3). A very standard operation is to create a new customer record, from which invoices can be created. It initializes a field “CustomerSince” with today’s date at creation time. Another field “Updated” is initialized with today’s date when a new invoice is created for that customer. Doing this same operation in Pan X causes both “CustomerSince” and “Updated” with today’s date at creation time, which is getting a little ahead of ourselves (not everyone places an order at the same time their account is created).

I looked at the Design Sheet in Pan 6, and I find that the Default values for both fields are set to “today”. Except that in the “Updated” field it is spelled “tody” and it would appear that this field was originally set up to do that Default, but since it is spelled wrong it does not do that. And “not doing it” is the correct action, so I’ve never had occasion to explore this.

In the database converted to Pan X, the Default for “Updated” is also “tody” but it would appear that Pan X is “doing me a favor” by figuring out “what I really meant”. This is easy enough to correct, once I figured out where this rogue date is coming from, but it makes me wonder if I’ll find more unexpected “helpfulness” in my Pan X migration from 6. Can anyone shed light on this?

2

I suspect that it is the system software that is using auto-correct, and assuming you are not somebody’s toady!

3

:grin: ribbit!

4

It appears that Panorama X will allow anything that begins with “tod”, so

  • tod
  • today
  • todaysdate

will all work.

Panorama X is an all new program, with entirely new code. There is basically no Panorama 6 code in Panorama X (actually some libraries have the same Panorama code, but 99.9% all new). So yes, I’m sure there are potentially dozens of places where Panorama X might handle incorrect input somewhat differently than Panorama 6 did. It was never going to be possible to duplicate every single edge case and border condition when rewriting a half million lines of code into 200,000 lines of brand new code.

5

Thanks for the explanation. Funny that “correct” operation was due to a programming error that was never caught. I expect to encounter other instances as I go on. I think it’s pretty amazing that Pan X resembles Pan 6 as well as it does in light of the complete rewrite.