topic Re: Year only in a date field in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:57:29 GMT

I have a feature class with a numeric field representing a year in the form of yyyy (2017). ArcGIS Pro has a tool called Convert Time Field that can take an integer and write it to an existing date field or it will add one for you.

When I run the tool it returns a date in the form of 1/1/2017. Is there a way to format a date field to show just the year?

Re: Year only in a date field

Egge-Jan_Pollé — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 19:10:08 GMT

Hi Joe Borgione‌,

The answer to your question is, I think: No. No, not in ArcGIS Pro.

The display format for dates depends on your regional settings. ArcGIS Pro follows the Windows settings for date formats and uses the system short date format (numerical) to display dates, independent of the underlying database's format on the system.

Of course if you display your data somewhere else, e.g. in ArcGIS Online, you can choose to format your dates to only show the year.

But then I have this question: why would you convert your year values to dates to begin with? If the year really is the only thing you are interested in - and there really is no day, no month, no time to store - then maybe the numeric field you started out with would be sufficient, or not?

What do you think?

Best regards,

Egge-Jan

Re: Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 19:22:51 GMT

why would you convert your year values to dates to begin with? It was requested of me.....

Of course if you display your data somewhere else, e.g. in ArcGIS Online, you can choose to format your dates to only show the year.

Looking at this now: https://community.esri.com/thread/222378-text-to-date-using-arcade-expressions, it's just that we have a 'year' field that was provided as an int....

Re: Year only in a date field

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 19:46:02 GMT

Re: Year only in a date field

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 19:53:57 GMT

Funky in the field calculator using arcade on a date field

2019-04-17 8:11:55 AM

using

Year($feature.DT_test)

yields

1905-07-11

So I would say no as well, but I am sure it is something silly or just something

Re: Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 19:54:10 GMT

hahahaha; my stupid question of the day left you speechless!

Dan Patterson‌

Re: Year only in a date field

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:02:16 GMT

now remember Arcade is an evolving language... I am sure it is just moi and not something that they didn't test on a date field

Xander Bakker‌ can you spot my error?

Re: Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:08:08 GMT

I'm thinking this a red herring: one of the guys here wants to use the integer field as a year in a dashboard. Not exactly sure what the objective is. On to other more intangible things....

Re: Year only in a date field

Robert_LeClair — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:12:35 GMT

If you added a new text field and calc'ed that field to have the year only? Would that work?

Re: Year only in a date field

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:47:14 GMT

You missed my "Funky" link above. Apparently a text or numeric is not needed, but a Date field with just the year... cool results though

Re: Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:51:53 GMT

Probably; this is a project wrought with bad data, so any additional fields are just a band-aid at best. My colleague found something on github that he's working through. We are seeing more and more non-data types who want data-intensive analyses. Not a great combination. (Can't you just hit cntrl F3 and make my spreadsheet a bomb-proof database?)

Re: Year only in a date field

Robert_LeClair — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:52:39 GMT

I did - cool "funky" link though!

Re: Year only in a date field

XanderBakker — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 19:08:35 GMT

Not sure what the error is, but if you want to strore the year in a separate field, you would create an integer field, and doing a calculation with Arcade on a date field using Year($feature.NameOfDateField) and storing the result in an integer field will just store the year value. Just tried it and it works as it is supposed to. Not sure what might be different in your case.

Re: Year only in a date field

AlexZhuk — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 19:32:12 GMT

I think there is a misunderstanding between the core properties of the Date, Text, and Integer types. Or it's just my misunderstanding?

Re: Year only in a date field

JoeBorgione — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 19:41:49 GMT

Not really a misunderstanding per se, just wondered if it's possible some how. I guess it's not and as mentioned earlier, this red herring is back into the sea......

Re: Year only in a date field

Anonymous User — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 21:06:04 GMT

Some of my favorite problems to have: 1) writing code for rotational corrections brought over from legacy CAD files 2) commingling scalar & vector "man behind the curtain" magic to represent velocity arrows at the requested scale that originates at a fixed point, and 3) Dealing with date conversion for client display. Just kidding, all of that gives me a headache but date management is something you have to start managing the expectations of your users (and boss) on and start looking for stronger typed solutions that offer better management of date & time with built-in functions for your chosen flavor of RDBMS. If you don't have options on those fronts, DatePart is a handy function to gain familiarity with for popping the date into a text field. Big picture advice - educate yourself on date field manipulation because it's worth getting your head around.

Re: Year only in a date field

Anonymous User — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 19:29:07 GMT

Hi Egge-Jan,

I'm curious if one application that a user would want to use the year as a date field instead of a numeric field would be for space-time binning(?). Say one wanted to evaluate the spatial distribution of model polygons on a landscape over many years, but the year field is numeric, would this be an instance where the user would want to convert year values to dates? And if so, is there a workflow you are familiar with to achieve that result?

Thanks,

Zachary