Constraint on date field not working

[abureaux]

Hello,

I have an issue with a constraint on a date field...

This is an incident form, and I cannot have users select a date > today. I also don't want users lying about the date. As such, I set the constraint up as follows:

Type	Name	Calculation	Constraint
Calculate	today_date_cal	format-date(today(),'%d-%m-%Y')
dateTime	actual_date		${actual_date_cal}<=${today_date_cal}
Calculate	actual_date_cal	format-date(${actual_date},'%d-%m-%Y')

Obviously, I am trying to strip away the H/m/s component and just compare dates.

Future date = Constraint ACTIVE. Great!

Today = Constraint INACTIVE. Great!

Earlier this month = Constraint INACTIVE. Great!

Anything before this month (e.g., last month) = Constraint ACTIVE. Wut?

So, I am probably missing something very obvious, but I am not sure what that is right now. Any insight?

Thank you.

[DougBrowning]

I think format date may turn it into a string causing a string compare.  Try comparing the actual date field instead.  Just a guess.

[abureaux]

Thanks for the response.

After some [odd] tests, I think you may be correct. That complicates things since I need to report time as well, and that is known to cause problems with constraints.

Knowing this, I'll do some more testing and see if I can figure out something reasonable.

[DougBrowning]

Just do both.  Have one field for the check and one to store.  You can set Esri bind to null and it wont upload to the service.

Of course this may cause issue when you want to compare dates in the future.  I usually store it as time then format it when you need it like in the map or report.