We are looking at one server with one instance of Baan. Each location of ours will have its own logistical/financial company.
Our locations are Europe/US/Tokyo.

Here is a problem - for the sales order /Inventory transactions sessions that use the current date for the order date and the Invoicing session that uses the current date for the invoice date the date/time comes from the OS. Our server is in Montreal so when the Tokyo or Europe company cuts an order or generates an invoice the order date/invoice date will come from the actual date/time down on Unix.

Has anyone had this problem before and how was it resolved ?
Other than customizating everywhere were the date/time is used in Baan (hundreds of sessions/tables).

We are on BaanIVb2 for now and will upgrade to BaanIVc4.
So there is no universal date/time functionality to use within Baan.

Baan uses the normal TZ environment variable so the user will see the correct time. However the same time is presented to a user on the other side of the world, that's correct. Since it's not an UTC time you have no way to solve this on a general level.

Within ERP Baan has introduced UTC times. But that's probably not what your looking for.

Rgrds,
Han

Here is some detail from a solution I did for an HP-UX international customer with sites in the US and Europe.

In Baan IV, the UNIX environment variable TZ is not used. Time zones are set in the datecurr file and in the language/date format settings for a given company. Any process that makes a gettime system call including reports uses the UNIX TZ variable.

The TZ environment variable can be display using the env command or by echo as described below. The default for US is EST5EDT. During this test, Pacific time was used.

$ echo $TZ
PST8PDT (used during testing)


$ env
.
.
.
TERM=hp
ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/8.0.6
PWD=/usr/lib
TZ=PST8PDT
REL=/u02/app/baanc/bse
BSE_TMP=/u02/app/baanc/bse/tmp
LINES=24



For a list of all time zones supported by HP-UX, refer to the /usr/lib/tztab file. Two sample sections are given below. For more information see the UNIX man pages for tztab and date.

# Greenwich Mean Time, British Summer Time
GMT0BST
0 3 25-31 3 1983-1984 0 BST-1
0 3 23-29 3 1985-1990 0 BST-1
0 3 25-31 3 1991-1995 0 BST-1
0 2 25-31 3 1996-2038 0 BST-1
0 1 25-31 10 1983-1985 0 GMT0
0 1 23-29 10 1986-1994 0 GMT0
0 1 18-24 10 1995 0 GMT0
0 1 25-31 10 1996-2038 0 GMT0

# Pacific Standard Time, Pacific Daylight Time
PST8PDT
0 3 24-30 4 1970-1973 0 PDT7
0 3 6 1 1974 0-6 PDT7
0 3 22-28 2 1975 0 PDT7
0 3 24-30 4 1976-1986 0 PDT7
0 3 1-7 4 1987-2038 0 PDT7
0 1 25-31 10 1970-1973 0 PST8
0 1 24-30 11 1974 0 PST8
0 1 25-31 10 1975-2038 0 PST8

In order to use the timezone within the BW client, the TZ environment variable must be set via a shell script or from the BW command line.

The command in the command box must start with two dashes and a space followed by the dash set. For example:

-- -set TZ=EST5EDT

Alternatively, the TZ variable can be set in the .profile shell script the user executes upon login or through a bshell wrapper script that would be set uniquely based upon geographic location.

In Baan IV, the UNIX environment variable TZ is not used. Time zones are set in the datecurr file and in the language/date format settings for a given company. Any process that makes a gettime system call including reports uses the UNIX TZ variable.
Jim thanks for replying, but the statement above has me a little confused. Could you please expand on this ? thanks.

Hi Jim - we already tried the setting TZ var previously, but that alone did not work. So I guess that the second part of the solution is to modify the date.curr file ? How ?
Also the date.curr file is per Baan instance not per company or even per VRC. How to handle this ?

Thanks again.

As I see, you are using unix. So why don't you use two different $BSE instances? These could share identical things like $BSE/bin, $BSE/application as *symbolic* links, and some others like $BSE/lib would have to be different copies?

günther

actually I have the TZ setting alone to work now....no need to change the date.curr file.

Thanks....

The date.curr file is set per instance and I have used multiple $BSE with symbolic links when the customer has required this.

I have no clue what I meant by the earlier statement. When I reread this it confused me as well. And, I will not fix it since it is 1:25 AM and I will probably only make it worse.

The TZ alone can work. Baan 5 has UTC support and does not require the use of the environment variable. The modification for the date.curr file is to change the display output maks for the date as US standard is different from Europe, et. al. Since the display mask is set in the date.curr file, that is why we have two of them in seperate $BSE.

-- Jim

The session ttaad0160m000 displays the time zones with two fields: "Time Zone" and "Time Zone Code" but for each record, the "Time Zone Code" is empty. Is it correct and should not it be filled by the values I can find in the /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/ like "EST5PDT", "CET", "PST8PDT",..

Thanks. :confused: