Cannot get dates right in TimeSeries

EthanLevy — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 13:46:41 GMT

Hello,

I'm seeing bizarre behavior when loading dates in to TimeSeries with Text Import. My data are monthly measurements over twelve years, date only, no time, in an Excel sheet. I have tried saving as .txt, .csv, with different cell formatting; I've tried various"Date" formats, "Text," "General," and even just entering number of days-since-1/1/1900. The TsTime field shows the dates as they were in excel, (e.g. "7/24/2002" or "2002-07-24", etc.) but does not use them. Here is what is happening:

1. Time Series Grapher shows my groundwater hydrograph with the correct TsValue on the y-axis, but they are perfectly equally spaced and assigned a date starting at 12/30/1899 and each record is one day later, i.e. Wells with 17 records end on 1/15/1900, wells with 125 records end on 4/29/1900, etc. My data are not perfectly equally spaced, so, even if I ignore the dates, this is bad.

2. I used the empty "UTCOffset" field to try calculating a date field from TsTime. If I just set UTCOffset = TsTime, they output as days-since-1900, e.g. 38928. None of the date-related functions in Python or VBScript have succeeded, rather they fail or populate <null> values.

3. I've tried various reset-type fixes like creating new excel files, clearing my Temp folder, moving to a brand new map/geodatabase, but no luck.

I feel that I've exhausted the google and forum search for similar issues and my clicking finger is sore... I must be missing something.

Any insight?!

Thanks heaps

Ethan

Re: Cannot get dates right in TimeSeries

EthanLevy — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:42:36 GMT

OK, I solved this issue, in large part.

After graphing with the Time Series Grapher, I opened Properties on the graph, changed X field from "Ascending" to "None," and changed X label field from "<None>" to "TsTime" (the same as the X field).

This still seems like strange behavior for a time series grapher--why else would I want to graph a time series than to see it in an order/spacing that matches the times/dates, with labels to match?

I further note that setting "X label field" to "TsTime" without changing "Ascending" to "None" does not accomplish this goal (it maintains equal spacing on the x-axis and does not use the values as labels, i.e. each value is labelled from 1899-12-30 with an interval of one day). When values are dates/times, why does "ascending" not display these values in chronological order with appropriate intervals?

Now I am wondering if I can set the default graph options to this desired behavior (labelling x-axis with x-field values and not "ascending") so that I don't have to change the properties for every graph.

Thanks,

Ethan

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Cannot get dates right in TimeSeries

Re: Cannot get dates right in TimeSeries