Someone else musta been tossed into this quagmire. I have a set of forms which gather information including dates. They are intiialized either by values from the MySQL database, today's date, or values captured already; the dates are written to the database. The database values are of type datetime. The current code keeps having problems since for some sources the date is a string (possibly syntatically invalid) and from other sources, it's a datetime object. It also appears that the MySQL database adaptor converts incoming datetime data into DateTime objects. Anyone have suggestions as to how to manage dates in this context. I'm about to rip out everything that uses DateTime objects, replace it with strings, and relegate DateTime to a very limited context.