topic Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working in ArcGIS Dashboards Questions

Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

AndrewRudin1 — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 14:59:13 GMT

I'm curious if anyone has had issues creating a data expression for Arcade in Dashboards that returns a date column?

I've noticed that if I include a date column in the FeatureSet I'm returning at the end of the script, the output contains no rows. Based on my testing I believe this is a bug in the FeatureSet() function if the dictionary you pass to it contains a date column. But since Arcade is pretty new to me maybe I'm doing something wrong

As an example, I put two samples below of the same code based on a public facing AGOL hosted feature layer. The first sample has the date column removed so you can see it does return data. The second sample the only difference is the date column is included, but you'll notice if you run it the results are blank. I tried this with two AGOL feature layers, so it doesn't seem to be a fluke with just one layer.

I'm trying to follow along on the GitHub example on how to join tabular data to one of my layers and returns a feature set (Link). Ultimately I want to slice and dice the layer in Arcade, but for this forum question I kept the script simple to show the issue.

Here's sample script 1 with the date column commented out. If you run in the Arcade playground you will se it returns data.

Here is sample 2 that includes the date column, but when you run it the results will be blank

Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

jcarlson — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 17:02:23 GMT

In Data Expressions, date fields need to be wrapped in the Number function in order to work properly. Try this:

... FME_DATE: Number(f["FME_DATE"]), ...

Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

JohannesLindner — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 12:17:42 GMT

Related Idea trying to get this fixed: Arcade: Allow Date() values in date fields (esriFi... - Esri Community

Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

AndrewRudin1 — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:51:48 GMT

Thank you for the responses. @jcarlson 's response was the ticket. Wrapping the reference to the input FeatureSet's date column translated the date into a unix timestamp integer, which then outputed correctly on the return statement.

Something else I noted was that null dates in the source data will get converted to a zero when the number function is called. On the output FeatureSet these zero's will appear as Jan 1, 1970. So to fix that I also had to wrap the number function in an IIF function, and then return null if the incoming number() value is zero.

So the column request looks like this:

//If incoming date value is zero then return null, else return the date value as a unix timstamp integer

MY_OUT_DATE_COLUMN: iif (number(f["MY_IN_DATE_COLUMN"]) == 0

,null

,number(f["MY_IN_DATE_COLUMN"])

)

Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

AndrewRudin1 — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:53:58 GMT

Thanks Johannes. I upvoted that idea. Agreed that this could be improved to be more seamless.

Re: Arcade Data Expressions with Date Column Not Working

DavidNyenhuis1 — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 19:25:29 GMT

With this week's update to Arcade and ArcGIS Dashboards, date fields in feature set constructors now just work. You no longer have to wrap dates with Number() if you pass the dictionary into the FeatureSet() function (which as of this release accepts a dictionary as opposed to only text based JSON).

Instead of:

return FeatureSet(Text(dict))

Do this:

return FeatureSet(dict)

Learn more in this blog post.

NOTE: For Enterprise users, this update is targeted for 11.2