prevent user leaving a control until a valid entry has been entered

[isladogs]

I really did wonder whether this thread was also an April Fool like the Office 366 item!

Whilst I agree the built in date picker is dire, why anyone would prefer to type in a date rather than use a decent calendar form is beyond me.
Even so how often will they actually type an invalid but confusable date like 29/02/2019?

[CJ_London]

Typing? Because users are speed typers using keyboard to navigate forms, they don’t really use the mouse for data entry. Also consider 31/4 etc or a real typo 41/4/19 gets converted to 19/4/41

[isladogs]

However if their speed typing is causing lots of mistakes, perhaps not such a good idea.

[CJ_London]

They don’t make many mistakes so far as I know, but the client wants the additional protection. A wrong date can have a big impact on a number of reports

[orange]

Is there anything common to these dates (eg always earlier/later than today etc)?

How would format validate 03/02/2019 from 02/03/2019?
Seems day and month below or equal to 12 would require knowledge of the "transaction/entry" data in context.

A wrong date can have a big impact on a number of reports

depending on criticality then perhaps a custom calendar (as Colin hinted) or another format YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601).

[CJ_London]

As already stated a custom calendar is not an option. Some date verification can be applied but client isn’t keen. They fully accept a user might mistakenly enter a wrong but valid uk date. They simply don’t want access to change an invalid uk date into a valid us one

[accesstos]

Hi Ajax,
Have a look at the attachment.
This is an approach with a class module that keeps your validation code for each date control in the form. As you want, the cursor remains in the control after the critical message, and in addition, the advantage of this approach is that you dont'n have to add any code in the events of text boxes in form's code module. You have only to mark each date TextBox as "UKDate" (or whatever) in their Tag property.
Pay attention in the form's events code (Load-Unload) that creates an istance of the class for each control that have the "UKDate" word in its Tag property.

I hope it helps!

[isladogs]

Just tested this.
Whilst it correctly blocked 29/02/2019, it didn't accept the last valid date of the month e.g. 28/02/2019 was also blocked
I've changed all instances of < to <= in the IsUKDate function and I believe it now works as you intended

[accesstos]

Hi Colin!

Yes, indeed, it was a bug, but I consciously left the function as it was because it was not that the issue.

Ajax is responsible for these issues. :-)

[CJ_London]

thanks all - I'll give it a try - note still a bug for 30 day months, but fixed that!

[isladogs]

Ah yes. Didn't notice that.
I think its 'disgraceful' that you have not dealt with 29/02/2100 etc.
Built in code obsolescence!

[CJ_London]

don't think I'll be around to worry about it