[Zope] Forms + MySQL + DateTime = a mess

[Dennis Allison]

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.