Trying to CFCATCH an ill formatted date

Two of the reasons the code is not working are:

• <cfoutput>#DateFormat("31/12/2009",      "mm/dd/yyyy")#</cfoutput> will amend your string,      switching the month and day to result in 12/31/2009. So it will not      generate any error for strings entered as dd/mm/yyyy.
• Also a numeric entry will be      taken as a numeric representation of a date/time object and will therefore      be converted to a mm/dd/yyyy format. e.g. <cfoutput>#DateFormat(253698, "mm/dd/yyyy")#</cfoutput> will generate 08/06/2594.

Some options:

1.         You may need to test the form data

Is it a date?

10 characters long?

Are the third and sixth characters "/"s?

First 2 characters within range 1-12?

Characters 4 & 5 within range 1-31 (except short months - note Feb in leap years)

thereby ending up with something like

<cfif isDate(form.date) AND len(trim(form.date) EQ 10) AND (mid(form.date,3,1) EQ "/") AND (mid(form.date,6,1) EQ "/") AND isValid("range",mid(form.date,1,2),1,12) AND isValid("range",mid(form.date,4,2),1,31)> (code not tested)

2.         Provide calendar that user can click on to choose date. Date format is then set by you i.e. cfcalendar - default mask mm/dd/yyyy

http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/Tags_c_02.html#3798877

3.             Use <cfinput> tag with validate attribute

http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-p65.htm#wp1100379

Do you have it enclosed within a cfoutput block?

dateFormat() is for formatting something that is already a date (hence the name of the function), for just before you output it to a human.  It's not something that should be used for deciding whether a string can be parsed as a date,

There's functions like parseDateTime() and isDate() and isValid() for stuff like that.

--

Adam