The project I am working on currently uses the system.date.isBefore() function to validate dates, however some of the results are not making sense:
It seems to return false for any date after/including 02/10/2026.
Do you mean 2nd of October 2026 (every other country on earth’s date format), or 10th of Feb 2026 (US-only date format) ?
The issue is that the month in getDate starts from 0 = Jan. I will never stop being caught by this… it makes 0 sense, but it’s Java that's wrong, not Ignition. I guess the getDate function could fix it… too late now though 
2 Likes
I think the sense is that the month is frequently converted to a string representation, Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.. This and translations require a lookup and, being programmers, our arrays are zero-based (so yes, zero-sense).
@cassidy.marquis , try this in Script Console.
a = system.date.getDate(2026, 03, 06)
b = system.date.getDate(2026, 01, 06)
n = system.date.now()
a
b
n
1 Like
As Nick pointed out, getDate() starts at 0 for the month.
When dealing with dates, I prefer to use system.date.parse() and explicitly specifying the format I expect. Between 0 based indexing and US/everyone else formats, it can be too ambiguous otherwise.
This is also a good example of intermediate variables and printing being your friend. Get the date, then print it to make sure it was parsed as you expected.
now = system.date.now()
firstDate = system.date.getDate(2026, 03, 06)
secondDate = system.date.getDate(2026, 01, 06)
print "Now:", now
print "\nFirst date:", firstDate
print " Before now?", system.date.isBefore(firstDate, now)
print "\nSecond date:", secondDate
print " Before now?", system.date.isBefore(secondDate, now)
###
# parse() example
checkDate = system.date.parse("1/6/26", "MM/dd/yy")
print "\n\nParse date:", checkDate
2 Likes
I definitely should’ve specified, I meant 10th of Feb 2026. I didn’t realize it used 0 for Jan, although I suppose that makes sense. Thanks!
Mon Apr 06 00:00:00 EDT 2026
Fri Feb 06 00:00:00 EST 2026
Mon Mar 09 10:39:05 EDT 2026
Well at least its an easy fix 
, thank you!
Very good advice, will be using. Thank you so much!