topic "Null Dates" showing in the completion date field. in ArcGIS Workforce Questions

"Null Dates" showing in the completion date field.

ErickWiggs2 — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 18:22:27 GMT

Hey All,

So here is an odd occurrence.

It looks like the Completion Date is defaulting to the epoch/unix “null date” of January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT (1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT). Except that we’re seeing a UTC time shift back 6 hours.

What I’m thinking is happening is that somehow when the field user is pressing complete, that the time stamp is somehow not getting updated.

Thoughts? Is it it just a random glitch or has anyone else seen this?

Re: "Null Dates" showing in the completion date field.

Anonymous User — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 18:39:20 GMT

Hi Erick,

That is strange. How are you exporting the assignments? It seems you are viewing them in Excel. Does the Workforce Web Application show the expected Completion date?

Re: "Null Dates" showing in the completion date field.

ErickWiggs2 — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 20:20:00 GMT

Hey Aaron,

Yes this is an export to excel, in order to better display and share the data. We have set up external web applications that hit the Assignments hosted feature class outside of the Work Force application in order to better manage the extent and amount of assignments that we deal with daily (avg about 1k).

When you look at it in Work Force it does give the same date:

We have a decently complicated system that auto-generates assignments from our GIS database.

After some further research we think we see what's happening. It appears as if someone has been closing out the task associated with the assignment outside of work force, but not providing a closed date. The scripts we have in place are picking up that closure and showing the assignment as complete, but since a completed date is required at this point it appears as if Work Force is giving the epoch base date of 1/1/1970 (or 12/31/1969 @ 6pm due to the UTC shift).

So it looks like this is an error in the workflow and not a glitch in the system (thankfully!)

Re: "Null Dates" showing in the completion date field.

Anonymous User — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 20:51:38 GMT

That makes sense. It seems like whatever external task/script is closing the assignments is setting the CompletedDate to 0 (which would be 1/1/1970 UTC) instead of correctly setting it to the current date/time or leaving it as Null.