Evaluation of symbolic dates

You can use symbolic dates for values of Date and DateTime properties in reports. Some symbolic dates identify a single day, such as Yesterday or Tomorrow. Other symbolic dates define a period (an inclusive range of dates), such as Current Month or Previous Quarter.

When evaluated, a symbolic date can produce a single day or a pair of days, depending on the operation in the Condition field.

All dates are computed relative to the current day in the time zone of the user, and not the time zone of the server. So, a user in London, who is working just after midnight, may find that the symbolic date Today is January 1, 2010, but at the same moment, on the same server, a user in California finds that Today evaluates to December 31, 2009. These results are irrespective of whether the server is located in California, England, or in any other time zone.

Example

In this example, you want to include in a report only operators who signed on during the current month. When running the report on October 16, you can enter October 1 as a starting date and October 31 as an ending date. But if you want to run the report again in November, you have to enter November 1 and November 30.

Instead of manually entering the starting date and ending date each time you run the report, you can use the symbolic date Current Month and run the report at any time.

For a detailed example, see the PDN article How to use symbolic dates in report selection criteria.

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