File Time

Carl,

Did I write you the other day saying I'd given up on FileTime ? I think I may have figured it out. It's still not automatic, since you can't fight Microsoft if they physically change the times on you (or like the CD-RW at work, adds another hour to compensate for DST for a file already stamped in DST.) But I think all your code needs to know is whether standard or daylight savings is in effect, and you just supply the desired time-zone offsets from UTC.

This workspace contains a bunch of Windows API covers, but the principle function of interest is named GetRealFileTime (reality being relative of course.) The rarg is a path\filename and the larg is the time-zone offset from UTC in minutes. So if your file on CD was written in eastern time (standard or daylight-savings), supply 300 as the larg. If you are comparing it to a file on hard disk (whose time Windows can change), supply 300 for that file if the current time-zone is EST, or 240 if now in EDT. This should allow you to compare the two files correctly.

EST: 300 GetRealFileTime 'c:\myfile.txt' should equal 300 GetRealFileTime 'x:\myfile.txt'

EDT: 240 GetRealFileTime 'c:\myfile.txt' should equal 300 GetRealFileTime 'x:\myfile.txt'

I just changed my time setting (Windows 2000) to non-daylight time, and this test gave the correct results. (One caveat if you try this at home: when you switch back to DST, Windows doesn't update it's filetime cache until you re-boot, so 300 GetRealFileTime will still show equal times for both files if you check them again before re-booting. Aftre that you have to use 300 for CD files, 240 for the files Windows can change.)

I hope this is clear (or becoming so -- it's still a bit of a whirl for me.) When you can, try it out on your machine and see if it works the way you want. One additional caveat: the SystemTimeToTzSpecificLocalTime function is only available on NT4+ -- it will not work on Win95/98/ME.

If these functions work, feel free to inline any of the subfunctions. I left them in for clarity and to make sure non-standard aplw.adf definitions are created. Once those are done, it would be simpler to inline the simple quadWCALLs.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Bill (wrp)