There will be plenty of instances where you will want to use dynamic dates to improve your Chris21 reports. But first, what are dynamic dates? When you run a report, the system dynamically calculates the datae according to the current date. We call dynamic dates “dynamic” because they change each time we run a report.They will automatically change, according to your critertia.
A good example of a report using a dynamic date is the wokflow Control Forwarding – WFF report. This report processes workflow records that are past the Due Date and forwards them to the next manager in the workflow chain.
You would typically run this process daily to ensure that overdue workflows are processed promptly. You should also schedule the process to run automatically for better efficiency.
Dynamic date example
The WFF process requests that you enter a date.
. If you enter today’s date it will simply run for this date each time it runs. Of course, this means after the firsts run the process will effectively be doing nothing because the date hasn’t changed.
To overcome this, we enter a dynamic date. The format is =T. This tells the system to run the report for the current date, therefore the date is dynamically changing. Then, when you schedule the process, it will consistently compare workflow Due Dates with the current date and process accordingly.
The main thing to note is that it’s crucial to place the “=” sign in front of the “T” so that the system recognizes a date calculation is necessary.
Other uses of dynamic dates
You can use dynamic dates in your Chris21 reports in various ways. For example, I recently created a report for a client that utilised a dynamic date to identify new starters, enabling them to be assigned a HR21 account.
The report was scheduled to run daily. It was able to identify if there were any new starters on Today’s date. I then setup a process to automatically create the HR21 user account, but that’s another story.
Another example involves a report I created that utilises a dynamic date to send a report to finance after each payrun. The requirement is for me to send this report the day after completing the payrun.To do thsi, I entered the dynamic date =T -1D.
In this example the report used the payrun end date field in the report selections. In this field, I entered =T-1D. I then Scheduled the report to run the day after the payrun end date and fortnightly (it was a fortnightly payrun). The dynamic date calculation ensures that the report sent to finance every fortnight includes only the current pay details.
Scheduling reports with dynamic dates
In order to use dynamic dates in your Chris21 reports you will need to create a form for each report and place it on the menu. You can’t use a dynamic date directly from the Report Designer. See my blog How to Add Chris21 Reports to a Menu if you need assistance with this.
I hope this article has given you some ideas about using dynamic dates in your Chris21 reports. For more information about the types of date calculations you can use, see the Chris21 help notes. They are quite extensive on this topic.
This is quite an involved topic so feel free to use the comments below to ask me any questions and I will do my best to help!