How to get the Date difference in Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds

A one liner solution for requirement to find out the date difference between two different dates in eScript:

function Service_PreInvokeMethod (MethodName, Inputs, Outputs)

{ 

var Date1 = new Date("12/22/2012");

var Date2 = new Date("12/23/2012");

TheApplication().RaiseErrorText(

"Date1 =" + Date1 + 

"\n Date2 = " + Date2 + 

"\n Date Difference in Days = " + (Date2.getTime() - Date1.getTime())/(1000*60*60*24) + 

"\n Date Difference in Hours = " + (Date2.getTime() - Date1.getTime())/(1000*60*60) + 

"\n Date Difference in Minutes = " + (Date2.getTime() - Date1.getTime())/(1000*60) + 

"\n Date Difference in Seconds = " + (Date2.getTime() - Date1.getTime())/(1000));

            return (CancelOperation);

}

Here below is the output:

How to add number of Hours to a Date Field

I am back with a very basic requirement which might looks very easy, but the solution might not be that easy to implement.

Requirement:

I have a Service Request form applet where I have following fields exposed on the UI:

• Severity - LOV field values: a) 1-Critical b) 2-High c) 3-Medium d) 4-Low
• Commit Date - Date Time field

Depending upon the Severity, being set by the user, system need to stamp the "Commit Date" field which is based on the calculation as per below table

If Severity Equals	Then SLA Hour =	Set Commit Date to [Created Date] + SLA Hour
1-Critical	10	[Created Date] + 10 Hours
2-High	20	[Created Date] + 20 Hours
3-Medium	30	[Created Date] + 30 Hours
4-Low	40	[Created Date] + 40 Hours

All this needs to happen whenever user changes the value for “Severity” field.

You can think of various ways to achieve this:

1. The famous old method says extract the Year, Month, Date, Hours, Minutes and Seconds out of the “Created Date” field, get the SLA Hour depending upon the “Severity” value and do the calculation (add SLA Hour to the "Hours" variable ) and then combine the parts to get the date back. But the Problem with this method is, you need to be very careful with the calculation because while adding the "Hours" get exceeded by 24, then you need to increase the date by 1 and if then again adding 1 Day to the date reaches the month limit, you need to increase the month by 1 and so on ........................ problem, problem, problem :|
2. I was also thinking to first convert the "Created Date" variable into "Seconds", then add the ("SLA Hour" * 60 * 60) to it and re-convert it back to Date. But didn't find the required function/methods available OOB for this in eScript. So, I dropped this idea as well.

So, the only tricky part here is how to get the number of “Hours” get added to a Date and after some of the experiment I was able to achieve it with some simple and easy method.

Here you go:

1. Get the master data setup in the LOV:
   
2. Create two calculated fields:
   

   Name	Calculated	Calc Value	Type
   SLA Hour	True	LookupValue("SLA", [Severity])	DTYPE_NUMBER
   Temp Commit Date	True	[Created] + ([SLA Hour]/24)	DTYPE_DATETIME

3. Check the “Immediate Post Changes” = True for field “Severity"
4. Create a Business Component User Property:

Name       :           On Field Update Set

Value       :           "Severity", "Commit Date", "[Temp Commit Date]"

That’s it. Make sure you have the “Immediate Post Changes” checked for “Severity” and be careful about the “Type” for the two calculated field created, otherwise it won’t work.