ECO: DateTime values in OCL

Today, Jonas Högström posted an excellent summary how to specify DateTime-values in OCL. He also commented on the effect different timezones have on it. A lot of people browse blogs first and thus I repost it here.

The question came from Dmitriy Nagirnyak, a regular in the public newsgroup about ECO.

Could somebody please explain the correct way for writing OCL with DateTime. [?]

These are the literals that OCL accepts:

Date: #yyyy-mm-dd
Time: #hh:mm:ss
Time: #hh:mm
DateTime: #yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss
DateTime: #yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm

It is independent of culture, religion, dst, timezone and any other setting that might vary on your computer. The Time literals will return a TimeSpan value. There is unfortunately
no way to specify "days" in this literal...

It will [be] - on second thought- in the current timezone and current DST.
DateTimeFormat however has no influence ofer the parsing of the literal.

German ECO book available in English -soon-

I blogged about the fact that the German ECO book got an update. I was very amazed that Alois gave me even better news: it is being translated to English right now and Alois expects a first RC of it within the next two weeks...

If that's not great news, what is!?

German ECO book gets an update!

Wow! Great work, Alois! The German ECO III book got lots and lots of new content. And even better: Alois announced in the newsgroups that an English version is in the works.

And the best thing about it: it is all available for download for free right here.

Developer NOW!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to be at the SDC in Arnhem. However, as it turned out, there is yet another Delphi-related event earlier than that in Mülheim. As it is just around the corner for me, I'll be going there. So, if you cannot make it to Arnhem, maybe we will meet there.

If this is the first time you hear about "Developer NOW!", have a look here.