Thanks, everyone...

Our program is over thirty years old, and has been worked on by about a dozen different programmers, all supposed Powerbuilder experts. I did a sweep, and fixed references in about twenty or so datawindows --  each datawindow pointed to nearly every programmer having used Today() or DateTime(Today(), Now()) through the years some objects being part of the program since PB 7 at some point. ... So I don't think I'm completely crazy thinking this may have worked at one time --unless every programmer in the last thirty years has made the mistake, and we're only now catching it. Granted, there were many more datawindows that used Today without the parens.

We're in the middle of switching databases from SQL Anywhere to SQL Server, so our regression testing is definitely doing their due diligence! 

Hi Richard,

John and Miguel are absolutely correct and while I don't have any docs for PB 3.x I do have PB 5.x docs and, for the most part, it is the same Help content that John provided.

I think the other important point here is to differentiate between setting an initial value in the painter, which is quite limited in flexibility, versus doing so in script in say, the Constructor event, for example. Doing so this way gives you much more flexibility if the initial value needs to change depending upon the circumstances or if you need to set a value that just can't be accomplished in the painter for some reason.

As long as you're returning a string (and the value you're "stringing" is the correct data type), then you shouldn't have any issues. Something like This.object.thedate.initial = String(RelativeDate(Today(), 42)) would work just fine.

HTH...regards,

Mark

Hi, Richard - 

PB Help can be, well, helpful:

Miguel is correct.

Best regards, John