[54] METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DATA PROCESSING WITH CONVERSION OF AMBIGUOUS DATA STRUCTURES
[75] Inventor: William E. Connor, Stony Brook, N.Y.
[73] Assignee: Catch/21 Enterprises, Inc.,
Hauppauge, N.Y.
[21] Appl. No.: 735,397
[22] Filed: Oct. 21, 1996
[51] Int. CI. G06F 17/30
[52] U.S. CI 707/100; 707/1; 395/704
[58] Field of Search 707/1, 101-103,
707/704
[56] References Cited
U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS
5,307,498 4/1994 Eisen et al 395/700
5,389,924 2/1995 Ogawa 341/106
5,454,106 9/1995 Burns et al 395/600
5,630,118 5/1997 Shaunessy 707/1
5,644,762 7/1997 Soeder 707/101
5,719,826 6/1993 Lips 368/29
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
"Data Logic Generator", Jon Pearkins, Enterprise Systems Journal, vll, n5, p. 7(1), May, 1996.
"Platinum TransCentury Date Simulator", available on the World Wide Web at http://ww.platinum.com/products/ year2k,retrieved on Dec. 16, 1997, Dec. 1995.
In data processing ol a computer software having ambiguous data such as a data structure with date field having an ambiguous YY two digit year representation based on 00, inputting ol one or more ambiguous year representations is detected prior to performing a processing step and a corresponding unambiguous year representation with the same format as the ambiguous year representation is substituted for each detected ambiguous year representation in performing the processing step. One or more unambiguous year representations to be outputted by the processing step is detected and each unambiguous year representation to be outputted is converted to the corresponding ambiguous year representation which is outputted. The substituted unambiguous YY year representation has the same format as the YY ambiguous year representation but uses a base year other than 00 that precedes the earliest date ol the ambiguous date fields. In this way, processing errors due lack ol century representation are corrected without requiring modification ol the logic ol the processing steps or ol data sources. The date conversion can be automatically performed and can be applied to legacy software ol different computer language types.
4 Claims, 15 Drawing Sheets
