Date Value Inconsistent

judym598

Certified Senior Developer

over 7 years ago

Why is Appian not recognizing the timezone as being 'CDT' when evaluating the today() function. We have a process that runs at 11:00 pm each Thursday. It starts on time but the first test is to evaluate 'today()' and when it does, the today() value is the next day so the process ends. If it evaluated today() in the CDT timezone - it would continue. I ran several tests to figure this out. I have a workaround for this - I will use 'todate(now())' which I believe will evaluate the date correctly at 11:00 PM CDT because now() recognizes the timezone. Is this a bug? I tested this in both our DEV environment (which is 17.1 and in PROD which is 16.3).

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0 Stefan Helzle
A Score Level 3
over 7 years ago

Did you check the timezone settings in model properties? Appian itself is always GMT. Overwriting process timezone with the initiator timezone might help you.
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 7 years ago

Yes - checked that as well.
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 7 years ago

FYI - I opened a support case for this and was told that this issue has been reported before and has been confirmed to be a bug. FYI - Appian is tracking this internally via AN-41155.
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0 Stefan Helzle
A Score Level 3
over 7 years ago

OK. Thanks for the info.
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 7 years ago

No problem. Until it gets fixed, if you're needing to check a date using the today() function and the GMT issue could impact your results, the workaround I'm using should help, i.e., todate(now()).
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0 martinc8721 over 7 years ago

have you tried calling an external service in order to get the dateTime and timezone you need?
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 7 years ago

No - we haven't tried that but using the todate(now()) works.
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 7 years ago

To update - the todate() function evaluates the now() in GMT time so todate(now()) did not work for me when evaluating at 11:00 PM CST. The documentation states that to return a localized date for a process initiated by a user, the local() function must be nested within the todate() function. So - todate(local(pp!starttime)) returns the localized date when a given process started. Otherwise the date is returned in GMT.
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