Search Results date_to_canon

Overview

QLTDATE is an Oracle Quality (QLT) utility package body owned by APPS that centralizes date and number formatting and conversion logic for the Oracle E-Business Suite Quality module. Its principal responsibility is to reconcile date strings that users enter or view in the Oracle Forms-based Quality interface with the canonical internal formats used when those values are persisted or compared. The package also provides canonical number handling, because Oracle Quality permits decimal precision of up to twelve significant digits following the decimal separator.

The central abstraction in QLTDATE is the concept of a mask. The package defines several private canonical constants, including the date mask YYYY/MM/DD, the date-time mask YYYY/MM/DD HH24:MI:SS, and a numeric mask built with an FM prefix and a D decimal marker positioned to yield twelve significant digits on the right. Because local installations present dates differently, QLTDATE resolves the effective display masks at runtime from the FND_DATE package rather than hard-coding a single presentation format.

Key Procedures and Functions

Twenty-nine documented programs make up the package interface. The mask resolution functions, USER_MASK, OUTPUT_MASK, and OUTPUT_DT_MASK, return the mask that should govern user-facing input, output, and date-time output respectively; when FND_DATE has not supplied a value, they fall back to the canonical naming masks.

• DATE_TO_USER, DATE_TO_USER_DT, and CANON_TO_USER convert internal date values into user-facing strings.
• DATE_TO_CANON, DATE_TO_CANON_DT, and ANY_TO_CANON convert values into the canonical storage representation.
• CANON_TO_DATE, ANY_TO_DATE, ANY_TO_USER, and ANY_TO_DATETIME translate external or ambiguous input back into Oracle DATE values.
• The numeric family, CANON_TO_NUMBER, ANY_TO_NUMBER, NUMBER_TO_CANON, NUMBER_CANON_TO_USER, and NUMBER_USER_TO_CANON, performs the equivalent normalization for decimal values.
• GET_SYSDATE supplies the current system date, and UPGRADE_TO_CANON performs bulk normalization of existing data.

No parameter lists are exposed in the available metadata; the descriptions above reflect the documented purpose of each program.

Tables Accessed

The documented metadata lists no tables referenced through APPS synonyms. QLTDATE is a pure conversion and formatting utility: it operates on values passed to it and on initialization state held by the FND_DATE package, rather than reading or writing application tables directly. The only external dependency of consequence is FND_DATE, whose user_mask, output_mask, name_in_mask, and name_in_dt_mask members are read to determine display behavior.

Usage Notes

QLTDATE is referenced by fifteen other packages, making it a shared foundation for Quality date and number handling. It is typically invoked from Oracle Forms-based Quality screens, from concurrent programs that must render or parse Quality data, and from custom extensions that need to produce values consistent with the Quality canonical format.

The source notes an important operational caveat: FND_DATE is not always initialized, notably when a report is submitted as a concurrent request. For that reason DATE_TO_USER deliberately avoids delegating to FND_DATE.DATE_TO_DISPLAYDATE and instead performs its own conversion, ensuring correct output regardless of initialization state. Custom code that reproduces Quality date logic should call these functions rather than formatting dates independently, so that canonical round-tripping remains reliable.