system.date*Between oddity

General Discussion
1

so I have a script that does some simple conversions in a perspective report. I look for the seconds between 2 date/times that i have parsed from a string(I know I know). In the standard report to time works great. there are 64,800 seconds in a 18hr period...

I then take that report and create a perspective view and pull in the date/times I want from a couple variables. but when I put in anything that crosses midnight it blows up. instead of 64,800 sec, I get 31million seconds. The date/time formats are all the same otherwise it wont work(another issues I figured out earlier). what is happening.

This is a good picture... date is from 4/1 at 6PM to 4/2 at 6AM

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image806×629 44.3 KB

This is what shows up... any thoughts?

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image1334×784 98.7 KB

2

Never Mind... I figured it out... it was the format of the date it self... it did not like the yyyy/MM/dd and finding the difference over midnight. as soon as I change it from yyyy/MM/dd to MM/dd/yyyy... all was happy again...

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3

Good work.

Tips on the report style:

  • Left align the text columns and their headers.
  • Right align the numeric columns and their headers.
  • 's' is the SI unit for second (but maybe your audience would struggle with that?).
  • Don't use underline (except for hyperlinks). It's not used in professionally designed applications, newspapers, magazines, advertising, etc. It cuts through the character decenders (y, p, q, g). It states "amateur"!
  • Why is everything in bold?
  • The summary line is confusing. It appears to be in three columns which suggests that it's related to the table above it in some way. A horizontal line (cell border1) would give a visual clue that this isn't related to the table. You're not stuck for space so spell out "Average" rather than the abbreviation. The 3.50 is missing units, presumably 's'.

Make it pleasing to the eye, let the user find the first word with a vertical scan rather than a weird raster scan, and allow units, tens and hundreds to align vertically for easy value comparison.

Try it and I think you'll be surprised.

1 A cell border is different to underline. It won't cut through the decenders and it will extend the full width of the cell. It can also use a different color and lineweight than the font does.

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4

Pssst! Also, it is 86,400 seconds per UTC day. Just in case that was throwing you off, too.

5

there are 64800sec in 18 hours.. which was the time frame of the report. corrected the 12 v 18 in the post above.
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:wink:

1 Like