Hi All,

I have what appears to be a very common problem when displaying a Time field in ASP.
The format will always show HH:MM:SS
However, I would like it to only show HH:MM and having read various pages have decided that the following SQL Select statement is the easiest for me to use:

Code:

"SELECT *,left(Start, 5) AS Start FROM tblform"

The above code works perfectly for me. (The reason for the * is I need to pull all the fields from the table).

However,I have a START and END field in my table and would like to use the same coding for the END field.
I have tried a few variations and cannot seem to get it right!

So, in summary, I'm looking for the correct way to Start and End and only select the first 5 characters from both.
Below is 1 of the examples which is not working:


Code:

"SELECT *,left(Start, 5) AS Start, left(End, 5) AS End FROM tblform"

little bit complicated messing around with string slicing in SQL when all you need is a display function

response.write hour(now()) & ":" & minute(now())
or
response.write FormatDateTime(Now(),vbShortTime)

will do exactly the same

BTW your SQL will only work IF the times are stored as strings, when they are stored correctly as datetime fields it will fail.

What chrishirst said.

Also, I can understand you needing to pull all of the fields from your table. Even then, * is not the best way to go about that since it does increase the amount of server resource used quite significantly. You're far better off listing them in your SQL query, no matter how messy it looks.

This code will do what you want:

Start_Time = FormatDateTime (RS ("Start"), vbShortTime)

Don't put it into your SQL query though.

Hi Guys,
Many thanks for your responses.
I have actually opted to use response.write(left(rs("START"),5)) and response.write(left(rs("END"),5)) instead of messing around with the SQL statement.
But thanks once again for looking into this for me!

No probs.

That's all well and good as long as you want to keep it a string. But it's better to use FormatDateTime in case you ever need to do comparisons (say of Start and End to make sure End > Start or something like that.)

Session["Time"] = System.DateTime.Now.ToShortTimeString();

The above code will save the short time as a string the session vaiables which means it can be accessed from any page.

Regards j1mb0jay (18)

<misleading link removed>

Its an ASP.NET solution not an ASP one.