In a later lesson, you will learn how to specify a format mask for a date item in your form. In addition to the format masks a developer might explicitly define, Forms Builder uses several of its own internal masks. The values for these internal masks can be specified with property values and environment variables.
To eliminate potential errors caused by the year 2000 (Y2K), you can set environment variables that Forms Builder uses to format date items:
Database date format mask: Each database session within a Forms application has a single database date format mask. A default value for this mask is established by the Oracle server’s initialization parameter. You can override this value in each new database session for a particular client by setting the client’s NLS_DATE_FORMAT environment variable.