Question

Can Laserfiche date fields handle dates earlier than 1/1/1753?

Laserfiche

Updated June 20, 2016

asked on April 6, 2016

One of our customers is attempting to import documents from the early 1700s, and we've discovered that trying to populate date fields with a date prior to January 1, 1753 is not allowed. I understand that this seems to be a limitation in MSSQL's datetime datatype, but I was wondering if anyone had run into this issue before, and if so, how have you resolved it? I'm not sure converting that date field into a text field is a preferred option for this customer, but I can't think of any other way to go, other than to leave that date field blank for any <1753 document.

Thanks!

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Replies

replied on May 5, 2016

I hope Laserfiche will consider addressing this. We have the same issue scanning many of our oldest county records dating back to the early 18th century. Many of these documents are available publicly through weblink and are searchable by date, name, document type etc.

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replied on April 6, 2016

As a workaround you can use a text field, instead of a date field, to input dates prior to 01/01/1753.

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replied on April 6, 2016

You could use field formats in order to force that text field to require and display as date inputs.

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replied on April 6, 2016

Justin and Steve, what would happen if someone dropped and recreated their Laserfiche tables with the DateTime2 type? That would allow dates back to year 0001-01-01.

Interesting reading but 1753 is the first full year after Britain adopted the Gregorian calender. There's even an Act of parliamen in 1750 which established the new style of calender. I wonder if that makes it the oldest in-use acts.

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replied on April 6, 2016

Just tried this on a test system--looks like this allows you to directly input <1753 dates into the database, which makes them visible in the client's metadata pane, but any changes to the field from the client itself still result in an invalid date error.

I'll have to explore the possible repercussions of changing the datatype of the customer's template field to Text; is this anything that Laserfiche is considering addressing in a future release?

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replied on June 20, 2016

I just accidentally ran across this limit. I can't believe there isn't someone out there storing really old records in Laserfiche!

Well, I guess if they are, they are using workarounds.

Still, you wouldn't think this would be a big issue to overcome.

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Can Laserfiche date fields handle dates earlier than 1/1/1753?

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