Back Forward Understanding the Date, TimeofDay, and DateTime property types

Concepts and terms

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Process Commander employs sophisticated representations and processing of dates and times. The internal and external representations of dates and times are important to understand, and some care is needed when both designing applications and building applications that use dates, times, and date or time calculations.

 Introduction

A single Process Commander application can be deployed worldwide. The system can have:

To support varied needs, three different types are available for properties:

When presented with a DateTime value, a corresponding date and a time-of-day (in a specified time zone) can be determined.

However, the converse is not usually true: when starting with a Date and a TimeofDay value, multiple differing but "correct" DateTime values can be constructed, depending on assumptions about time zone, Daylight Savings Time, and other considerations. For example, when the date is January 1 in London, it can be December 31 in New York.

Likewise, when comparing two values, or computing with dates, times, and DateTime values, context is important. A time of 6:15 P.M. in London is earlier, not later, than 6:16 P.M. in New York.

Different languages and locales use different formats to present dates and times; Process Commander supports many output and import formats while using only three property types: Date, TimeofDay, and DateTime.

 The internal representations

The internal representations are efficient for sorting and comparisons and Java operations, but may not be familiar to business users:

 Entering date and time constants (developer)

When a developer enters a value corresponding to a Time of Day or DateTime into a rule form, no format conversion occurs, but certain shortcuts are available.

Date values

You can enter a date using either two or four digits for the year. If the year contains two digits, the system uses an algorithm to determine a "reasonable" century based on the current date. During 2006, the system prefers dates between 1997 and 2097. Examples:

Dates

CautionA property of type Date can have a null value. For example, if you use the Property-Set method to set a Date type value from a Text value that is null, the result is null. However, the Java Date operations convert an integer value of 0 to the date 19700101 (January 1, 1970). This Date value may result when Process Commander evaluates expressions that internally use the Java Date operations. VAGUE Clinic 1/12/06 OLSOK.

TimeofDay values

To enter a constant TimeofDay value into a rule form, enter either all six digits or omit the seconds portion. For example:

Time of Day

DateTime values

When entering a DateTime value, you can omit all the characters after the T, or omit the period and the millisecond values. If the year contains two digits, the system uses an algorithm to determine a "reasonable" century based on the current date. During 2006, the system prefers dates between 1997 and 2097. If you omit the time zone, the date and time are converted from the current server time zone to the GMT time zone by adding or subtracting hours. Examples:

DateTime examples

Date constants

When entering a Date literal constant as an entire expression, be sure to include double quotes, to distinguish:

"20061215"

the date December 15, 2006 from:

20061215

an integer that is converted to 20,061,215.

 Entering date and time constants (application user)

Entering and presenting values in an application context

Process Commander supports dozens of formats that your application can choose to present dates and times in ways familiar to application users. The formats that apply in specific cases depend on the control rule (Rule-HTML-Property rule type) associated with the property or the form and the locale.

Many formats are locale-specific, changing automatically based on the value set on each user's Windows workstation, or the locale of a user, as recorded in the Operator ID data instance.

For example, the date 20061215 can appear as any of the following:

12/15/06
15/12/06
December 15, 2006
15 décembre 2006

Similarly, many different formats and shortcuts are available for input. These date and time formats are based on version 1.3 of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). PROJ-546

Time zone and Daylight Savings Time conversions

The boundaries of time zones change from time to time. In addition, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 changes the starting and ending dates for Daylight Savings Time in most of the United States, starting in 2007.

V5.3 uses the time zones provided by the JVM on which it runs. The JVM typically uses data provided by the Olson TZ database. Details on this database are available from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub.

Tip Daylight savings time rules are supplied by Java JDK vendors. In a multinode system, it is important that the same rules are installed on each node. For specifics on Sun Microsystems JDKs, see Pega Developer Network article PDNPRKB-21247: Platform Bulletin: Sun JVM Issues. For details of vendor JDK support of daylight savings time and downloads, consult one of the following links:

WWWhttp://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/
WWWhttp://java.sun.com/javase/tzupdater_README.html
WWWhttp://www.hp.com/products1/unix/java/TZupdater_license.html
WWWhttp://edocs.bea.com/jrockit/geninfo/diagnos/tzupdate.html OK 1/28/09

Testing input and output formats

To see the effect of a specific control rule on input and output formats for a property:

  1. Open the Property form.
  2. Click the Preview toolbar button (Preview).
  3. Enter a value into the Input field. Click  Show output .

The Locale Settings tool is useful in understanding the effect of locales on date and time formats. See About the Locale Settings tool.

 Converting or comparing a DateTime value to a Date value

PRKB-19983 The first eight characters of a DateTime value match the structure of a Date value, that is YYYYMMDD, for example 20060930. Accordingly, a simple way to compare a Date value with a DateTime value is to first select a substring of the DateTime value, consisting of the initial eight characters. Both values then have a common string format and length, and a normal string comparison works.

For example, the Property-Set method "converts" a DateTime value to a Date value by selecting the first eight characters: PRKB-24087

Property-Set

When the DateTime value is 20071201T011532.006 GMT, the resulting value for the Date property MyDate is 20070120.

However, this approach ignores the time zone information in the DateTime value, because the Date value conveys no time zone.

TipUse the standard function rule:

@FormatDateTime(.pyExpireDateTime, "yyyyMMdd", "", "")

to convert a DateTime value to a Date value, in the time zone of the Process Commander server.
CautionAvoid using Date property types in persistent objects, such as work objects or assignments, even if your application is used in only a single time zone, unless a time zone value is also stored in another property of the object.

 Converting or comparing a DateTime value to a TimeOfDay value

The substring of a DateTime value from character position 10 to character position 15 contains a time-of-day value, in the format HHmmSS expected by a property that has a Type of TimeOfDay.

Similarly to Date conversion, you can "convert" or extract this TimeOfDay value from a DateTime value with a Property-Set assignment:

Date conversionWhen the DateTime value is 20071201T011532.006 GMT, the resulting value for the Time property MyTime is 011523.

However, this approach ignores the time zone information in the DateTime value, because the Time value conveys no time zone.

TipUse the standard function rule:

@FormatDateTime(.pyExpireDateTime, "HHmmss", "", "")

to convert a DateTime value to a TimeOfDay value, in the time zone of the Process Commander server. (For examples, see Pega Developer Network article PDNPRKB-24087 How to extract a DateTime value to a Date or TimeOfDay value.
CautionAvoid using TimeofDay property types in persistent objects, such as work objects or assignments, even if your application is used in only a single time zone, unless a time zone value is also stored in another property of the object.

 Converting Date or TimeOfDay values to DateTime values

See Data type conversions in expressions and property assignments.

 Oracle and IBM DB2 notes

The Oracle datatype DATE does not correspond to any Process Commander date type. If feasible, use the Oracle data type DateTime or TimeStamp instead. Alternatively, use a Process Commander type of Text to hold the DATE value. C-1263 B-19148

Similarly, the IBM DB2 datatypes DATE and TIME do not correspond to any Process Commander types. When feasible, use the DB2 data type TimeStamp instead. If not, use a Process Commander type of Text to hold the value. B-14387

Definitions CLDR, Coordinated Universal Time, expression, Java Date Pattern, locale, symbolic date
Related topics How to enter constants in expressions
Contrasting time-qualified rules, DateTime circumstances, and historical processing
About the DateTime Parse Tester tool
Standard rules Atlas — Standard control rules without parameters

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