Getting current date and time in C++ - c++

Question

I am doing a school project which basically records the in and out time of an employee(of an particular company).The employee while checking in or out should enter a unique key generated specially for him so that no one else can check in and out for him.Then referring to the employees position( A worker or a manager or something like that) his total working time each day , for a week and a month is calculated. The company starts at 8 am and ends at 5 pm for 1st shift and for second shift from 3.30 pm to 2.30 am.Plus Saturday and Sunday off.
Then after a month the program refers to the working time date stored in a file and calculates his pay(For workers its per hour salary and for managers it aint). If an employee is consistently late the details are forwarded to the HR account( so that necessary steps are taken).This will help the company log the details of their employees duty time plus give enough detail to take action if someones always late.
I'm doing this as a school project and it needn't be of enterprise class and all.. But i want the coding to perform as it should.Also i'm forced to use the old Turbo C++.
Now i'm struck in the place where the time of the employees in and out time is logged.
This coding does the work
void main( )
{
clrscr();
char dateStr [9],timeStr [9];
_strdate( dateStr);
cout<<" The current date is "<<dateStr<<'\n';
_strtime( timeStr );
cout<<" The current time is "<<timeStr<<'\n';
getch();
}
I saw it somewhere on the web but can someone help me understand how it works.
I also saw another coding
typedef struct _SYSTEMTIME {
WORD wYear;
WORD wMonth;
WORD wDayOfWeek;
WORD wDay;
WORD wHour;
WORD wMinute;
WORD wSecond;
WORD wMilliseconds;
} SYSTEMTIME;
#include <Windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
SYSTEMTIME st;
GetSystemTime(&st);
printf("Year:%dnMonth:%dnDate:%dnHour:%dnMin:%dnSecond:% dn"
st.wYear,st.wMonth,st.wDay,st.wHour,st.wMinute,st.wSecond);
}
I think the second one is better as it not only gives me date but also gives me the day so i can check easily for the weekends.
So help me understand how these time functions work. Also if you have any suggestions for my project they are welcome.

Answer 1

You need to decide the format you want to store these clock "events", both for in-memory storage and manipulation and the persistent (on-disk) storage format. When you use different formats for in-memory and on-disk (or in-database) storage, you would use methods to "marshall" or "serialize"/"de-serialize" the data (look up and read about these terms). You also want to decide whether these datetime "events" will be stored or displayed in UTC (Zulu-time, GMT), or local time. You may find that storing these 'timestamps' in UTC is the best, and then you need functions/methods/routines to convert human-readable, displayable values to/from local time to UTC time.
Consider defining a "class" that has the above methods. Your class should have a method to record the current time, convert to human readable, and serialize/de-serialize the data.
Though printf works in C++, you might want to use the stream operators you have used in your first example, as they are more in the spirit of C++. Consider defining a parse method to de-serialize the data, and a to_string method (ruby uses to_s) to serialize (though reading up on stream operator overloading, and overloading the '<<' operator is more the C++ way).

Answer 2

The first uses C library functions (though Microsoft extensions to the standard libc). The second uses the winapi function GetSytemTime.
Both will give the system time.
The first thing I'd look at is what the rest of your code uses. You should distinguish between what is winapi code, C code and C++ code, currently your question uses a mixture of all three.
The C++ method is preferred (if you are intending to write in C++) which would be to use the newer library. The C method is as per your first example, though without mixing libc functions with stream operators (a c++ feature). The winapi method is as per your second example (I'll forgive the use of printf as FormatMessage is a pain).