I have a requirement to report on the amount of time used for an end-to-end proc

mikej117 over 7 years ago

I have a requirement to report on the amount of time used for an end-to-end process flow. There are some complexities within the process flow that may cause ad-hoc extensions to the time allowance for that flow, so I am looking at creating a database table to record the initial time allowance, time used up already (for completed tasks within the process flow) and additional time allowances. The resultant data is to be displayed on reporting dashboards.
My question is around the best way to represent those positive and negative amounts of time. I see that there is a Time data type in Appian, but is that used to represent an amount of time, or the time of day? (Can it be negative?)

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0 Former Member over 7 years ago

This may add complexity to your scenario, but you could gather the difference between 2 timestamps to get an interval in seconds as an integer. Integers can be positive or negative, and gathering the interval in total seconds can keep that as a common point of reference for conversions to minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. This gives you the ability to perform calculations on the integer.

You could then have another data type as String to format the display of the integer as you desire. For example, your interval displays as -123 seconds, and you do not need to do any further calculations on this value, and instead want to display it in a nice format. With Text you could display it as: "- 00:02:03" or "-02 minutes & 03 seconds".

It would be best to have this as 2 separate fields so you can call them as you need -- integer to perform your calculations/conversions, and text to display as you desire.

Might not be what you're looking for, but figured I'd throw the idea out there.
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0 Former Member over 7 years ago

This may add complexity to your scenario, but you could gather the difference between 2 timestamps to get an interval in seconds as an integer. Integers can be positive or negative, and gathering the interval in total seconds can keep that as a common point of reference for conversions to minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. This gives you the ability to perform calculations on the integer.

You could then have another data type as String to format the display of the integer as you desire. For example, your interval displays as -123 seconds, and you do not need to do any further calculations on this value, and instead want to display it in a nice format. With Text you could display it as: "- 00:02:03" or "-02 minutes & 03 seconds".

It would be best to have this as 2 separate fields so you can call them as you need -- integer to perform your calculations/conversions, and text to display as you desire.

Might not be what you're looking for, but figured I'd throw the idea out there.
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