Today I want to talk about the behavior or daytime values when passed as an argument to code- stages. Even if Blue Prism discourages the use of code stages, I believe that this feature is one of the most interesting of them all and also helps to unleash the power of RPA. The problem with DateTime values in code stages is that BP represents them internally in UTC which could not be your locale (eg I work in Italy UTC+1)
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| Collection populated manually |
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| Just passed as argument and returned |
So BP suggests the following
If you do need to use a code stage then the following amendment at the end of the line will yield the behavior you expect: The point is that you cannot always pre-process data, for example, if we take data from DB we cannot pre-process them but we have to deal with wrong data like you can see in the images below
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| Data from DB |
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| Wrongdata after collection |
The solution is just to post-process the data with this piece of code.
Dim dtItemValue As DateTime
Dim newDtItemValue As DateTime
Dim localZone As TimeZone
Dim span As TimeSpan
For Each row As DataRow In data.Rows
For Each column As DataColumn In data.Columns
dtItemValue = Nothing
newDtItemValue = Nothing
If column.DataType = System.Type.GetType("System.DateTime") Then
dtItemValue = row(column)
localZone = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone
span = localZone.GetUtcOffset(dtItemValue)
spanString = span.ToString
dtItemValue = dtItemValue.Add(span)
newDtItemValue = dtItemVAlue.ToLocalTime
row.SetField(Of DateTime)(column, newDtItemVAlue)
End If
Next
Next
dataOut = data
You have to take care that BP passes arguments by value and not by reference so could be necessary to use this code every time you passed the collection into the code-stages. A special credit to Raffaele Ecravino and Antonio Durante for this brief piece of code.
Ciao,
ReplyDeleteWonderful post. Truly useful!
Now, I'm facing A "similar" issue.
I need to insert today's date in a word document, in the following format "02 May 2018".
I'm using this 'FormatDate(Today(), "dd MMMM yyyy")' (in an MS Word VBO - Type Text Action).
But, I got printed "02 mei 2018". I know that's why our serverare in Belgium, but... even after changing the ´M Windows Region and Language to English (UK), I'm still getting it in Dutch when, I run it (in the diagram).
Any idea?
Hi,
Deletei think you can solve the problem with a code block:
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/dotnet/standard/base-types/custom-date-and-time-format-strings
DateTime.Now().ToString("dd MMMM yyyy",CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"))
I have not tested it but it should be ok ;)
Thank you so much! But it won't compile! :( (I'm in BP v4)
DeleteI've tried right now, just use .Now as a property and not as a method and it will works.
Deletestring s = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd MMMM yyyy", CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"));
Otherwise, post the compile error ;)
DeleteThank you! I don't get ANY compile error, but... when trying to run it, it won't run and, the issue is:
ReplyDelete"Internal : Could not run the object because one of the code stages has a compile error, use Check for Errors for a list of problems"
Solved by creating this SQL (Stored Procedure):
ReplyDelete"
CREATE PROCEDURE PID0156_GET_CURRENT_DATE
-- Add the parameters for the stored procedure here
@CURRENT_DATE date = varchar
AS
BEGIN
-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
-- interfering with SELECT statements.
SET NOCOUNT ON;
-- Insert statements for procedure here
SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(11), convert (date, @CURRENT_DATE, 112), 106) AS [CURRENT_DATE]
END
GO
"
Thank you so much by your help!
Hi macs, i think this is an overkill, if you want to telle me more about the error, we can drill down and solve it
DeleteForgot to add:
ReplyDeleteI pass @CURRENT_DATE as FormatDate(Today(), "yyyyMMdd").
You may ask why I do this?
I do it for two reasons:
1. To be able to convert any date.
2. It won't be the first time that date on the program (BP, in this case) differs from date on the DB (generally, just hours).
Thank you so much! I know it's not the best option... but... since it's working :)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I do not know what else can I tell you about the error. I told you already already all that I know...
Thank you so much anyway... You are a *!!!