Date, numeric and monetary formats

Dates, numbers and monetary values must be displayed and entered in a format used in the country/region. These formats can be defined with the DBDATE and DBFORMAT environment variables.

Date and numeric format settings matter for data display and data input. For example, when displaying a DATE value to a form field, it will implicitely be formatted according to DBDATE. When the user enters a date in a form field bound to a DATE variable, the entered digits will be interpreted according the DBDATE.

The default value of these environment variables depends on the type of platform where the program executes:

When using the FORMAT field attribute or the USING operator to format dates with abbreviated day and month names- by using ddd / mmm markers - the system uses English-language based texts for the conversion. This means, day (ddd) and month (mmm) abbreviations are not localized according to the locale settings, they will always be in English.