PB Code using System Time

[Wyatt Chiltoskie]

I am writing a program using PB and need to call the system time and then add or subtract from it and display it? Anyone have any suggestions or sample code to do this????

[Mel Bishop]

Add or subtract what?

[Wyatt Chiltoskie]

hours, minutes, seconds. Basically I want to call the system time, save it as an integer and then add or subtract from that number in whatever format I can get it to come up as. Hope that makes sense.

[Mel Bishop]

Have you considered something along the lines of:

hs = hour * 3600     ' Hours to seconds
ms = minute * 60    ' Minutes to seconds
StartTime = hs + ms + seconds

Do your math thing then convert back to HH:MM:SS.

Or there may be an API you can use that I don't know about.

[Kev Peel]

There are a LOT of examples of using the API date functions on the forum. Search for "FILETIME", "Date Routines" or "DateDiff"/"DateAdd".

Here is one example:

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showthread.php?t=24656

[Egbert Zijlema]

Why not use my Gregorian Date Library? (see my website).

[Wyatt Chiltoskie]

Thanks for the help!!! Will see what I can do with the info.

[Michael Mattias]

hours, minutes, seconds. Basically I want to call the system time, save it as an integer and then add or subtract from that number in whatever format I can get it to come up as. Hope that makes sense.

Well, it makes sense in that I understand.. but... that's not what you want to do, that's how you want to do <whatever it is>.

i.e, there may be a much better way to do what you want to do than adding/subtracting to/from a system time saved as an integer.

MCM

[Elias Montoya]

Why not use my Gregorian Date Library? (see my website).

I second that, they are great.

[Knuth Konrad]

i.e, there may be a much better way to do what you want to do than adding/subtracting to/from a system time saved as an integer.

But that's pretty much the recommended way of doing it.

From MSDN, structure SYSTEMTIME:

It is not recommended that you add and subtract values from the SYSTEMTIME structure to obtain relative times. Instead, you should

• Convert the SYSTEMTIME structure to a FILETIME structure.
• Copy the resulting FILETIME structure to a ULARGE_INTEGER structure.
• Use normal 64-bit arithmetic on the ULARGE_INTEGER value.

The system can periodically refresh the time by synchronizing with a time source. Because the system time can be adjusted either forward or backward, do not compare system time readings to determine elapsed time. Instead, use one of the methods described in Windows Time.

[Michael Mattias]

>But that's pretty much the recommended way of doing it.

Yes, that is the way you DO date-time arithmetic.... but I am suggesting you may not need to do that date-time arithmetic.

Didn't we have a thread in the last week or two which also started out with doing date-time arithmetic, but the user ended up doing either WM_TIMER or waiting on a WaitableTimer Object?

True, doing the date-time arithmetic may be required... then again, it may not.

But we just don't know in this case, do we?

MCM