Date calculation x days - System date

Question

https://www.qvera.com/kb/index.php/2041/how-can-i-subtract-a-number-of-days-from-the-system-date?show=2041

Reviewed and attempted to follow the above article with adjustment of months rather than days and getting an invalid return date.    

Tried   90 days and 3 months and both returned same results  Originally I thought bad value may be due to addDays possibly limiting to a single month

 

 

var DateUtils = org.apache.commons.lang.time.DateUtils;
var fromdate90 = qie.formatDate('YYYY-MM-DD', DateUtils.addMonths(qie.deduceDate(qie.getSystemDate()),-3));
qie.debug('fromdateCalced ' + fromdate90);
 

returns

[path=1-2-3] - fromdateCalced 2020-03-63

Answer 1

The format date uses the standard java annotation for the format.  The java docs can be found here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

The format you are using is:
YYYY = week year (meaning the year for the first day in the week)
MM = month in year
DD = day in year

You probably want:
yyyy = year (meaning the year for the given day)
MM = month in year
dd = day in month

Change the format from 'YYYY-MM-DD' to 'yyyy-MM-dd' to get the desired output.

var DateUtils = org.apache.commons.lang.time.DateUtils;
var fromdate90 = qie.formatDate('yyyy-MM-dd', DateUtils.addMonths(qie.deduceDate(qie.getSystemDate()),-3));
qie.debug('fromdateCalced ' + fromdate90);

Comments

Perfect thanks for the clarification on the date part syntax, so actually was my formatDate function that failed not the addMonths.    
Made this correction and it is successfully returning the date now.
Thanks!

Answer 2

If you want to use the evaluate template option you can specify the days back or ahead.

qie.evaluateTemplate("{SYSTEM_DATE-7d[yyyyMMddHHmmss]}")

 

The system date node tag is replaced with the current system date/time in the specified format (see Format Indicator above) The system date/time can be adjusted by adding a modifier after SYSTEM_DATE in the format of [+/-][number][y/M/d/H/m/s/S]. For example, to adjust it ahead 2 hours, you could use the following syntax: {SYSTEM_DATE+2H[yyyy-MM-dd]}