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Using Date and Times with Task Handlers and Trees

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Passing dates and times through Task Handlers may require you to use some specific formatting.

Usage

 

Date, Time, and DateTime Remedy fields (including fields referenced by @base and @dataset) are returned as Ruby Time objects (see http://www.ruby-doc.org/<wbr/>core/classes/Time.html).  When passed to a Task Handler, objects are converted to Strings (by calling the #to_s method).  Ruby Time objects return strings in the format of "Thu Sep 01 12:04:35 -0500 2011" when #to_s is called.
 
Kinetic Request @answer values are always treated as Strings, so Date and Date/Time questions are stored as the date in a format called ISO8601, which looks like "2011-09-01T12:04:35-05:00".
 
To submit values into Remedy fields, you can either pass an ISO8601 string:
  @entry.update_attributes!(
    'Date/Time Field' => "2009-04-17T03:13:00-05:00",
    'Date Field' => "2009-04-17",
    'Time Field' => "03:13:00"
  )
or a Ruby time object:
  @entry.update_attributes!(
    'Date/Time Field' => Time.parse('Thu Sep 01 12:04:35 -0500 2011')
  )
 
Ruby Time objects have a nice helper method called #iso8601, which will return the ISO8601 string format.  They also have a method #parse, which will parse most valid Date/Time strings and return a Time object.
 
To use the @dataset['Last Modified Date'] (Modified Date - field 6 - you may need to add this to your data set) as the parameter for a handler, you need to use <%= @dataset['Last Modified Date'].iso8601 %> (which passes the ISO8601 string that ArsModels can write directly to the Remedy DateTime field).
 
To use a date/time from now, you would do something like this:
# Sets Scheduled Start Date to 10 minutes from now                
# Sets Scheduled End Date to 10 days from now                
@start_date = Time.now + 10                
@end_date = Time.now + (86400*10)                
@field_values['Scheduled Start Date'] = @start_date.iso8601                
@field_values['Scheduled End Date'] = @end_date.iso8601
@entry.update_attributes!(
   :field_values => @field_values
  )
 

Example

Here is a sample of the formatted output of various Date fields.

Parameter value to make a date  go into a date/time field in Remedy:

<%=@answers['datetime']%>

Format in node: 2011-09-08T20:33:00Z

Remedy Date Field (epoch value) - <%=@dataset['Last Modified Date']%>

Format in node: Thu Sep 08 15:33:53 -0500 2011

Remedy Date Field (epoch value) with iso8601 - <%=@dataset['Last Modified Date'].iso8601%>

Format in node: 2011-09-08T15:33:53-05:00

Parameter value to make a date  go into a date field in Remedy:

<%=  date = (Time.parse(@answers['Start Date'] + "T00:00:00Z")) 
date.utc.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")%>

Note you can put T06:00:00Z if you want it to be midnight eastern (to be sure it is the correct day) and so on for each time zone.

Here is a sample error message for the Remedy Date Field without the iso8601:

  CAUSE:
  ArsModels::Exceptions::ModelException: MessageType: 2
MessageNum: 1590
MessageText: Format of date or time value is not recognized.
AppendedText: "Thu Sep 08 15:33:53 -0500 2011": Date/Time Field
 

 

Parameter value to make a date/time human readable to go into a text field/email (this particular format would yield a date like 03/21/2016 9:37 AM:

<%=  date = (Time.parse(@answers['Start Date'])) 
date.utc.strftime("%m/%d/%Y %l:%M %p")%>
Details on ruby date formatting (the %m, etc part) can be found here.