Current Date and Time

vadim.rogatskin

It would be great to have a function to get current date and time. Timezone settings could be common for all users and maintained in the settings section

Miran

Manuela_Apostol

That would be great improvement to have, and avoid the somehow complexity of using Anaplan connect for retrieving the current date

Rebecca

Sukh_Sandhu

This is a must to have functionality. Thanks for sharing this idea.

CallumW

Would be extremely useful! The workaround for an automated solution is quite painful at the moment!

Chamanpreet

Currently Anaplan does not have a system date and we either use Anaplan Connect or Integration tool to import the current date.

Do we have any roadmap of including this into our tool

paul_gibson

You may want to vote on these to raise them further as a requirement.

 

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/NOW-Function/idi-p/34361

 

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/Current-Date-and-Time/idi-p/46550

Chamanpreet

It will be extremely useful .We are currently working it out through integrations.

Rebecca

This is a large piece of work and may nuanced behaviours. We will investigate this further for consideration on our longer term roadmap. 

mcconachie

I think it would be great if we could even have a function that called on UTC date and time. We could write a formula to convert based on model needs. 

sean_culligan

This was on the pipeline ready for release around 2018 and then disappeared so seems odd it went to 'needs community support'.

 

It would be a useful feature. If we could expand the users list to include a locale parameter then you could expand the functionality to give user specific time based dashboard filters. So would be very helpful.

JaredDolich

Just implemented another automated process using Informatica connector to get the current date. Granted, it wasn't hard but still seems unnecessary. I second @mcconachie comment. I know Anaplan is in the cloud and as long as we got the UTC time (or Epoch time based on 1/1/1970 UTC) we can suit it to our needs. Hope this becomes a reality. For large implementations, particularly ones where we need to make dynamic decisions about elapsed periods this is a pretty standard business requirement.

ujourney

Fundamental requirement

wquan

The ability to have a today() function that returns the date, similar to that in excel. It would aid in providing model builders with the ability to timestamp when certain end user actions were run (i.e. when a journal was created + present it on the dashboard)

Miran

angs75

If you are using DataHub using integration you can populate Current Date and Distribute it to multiple Model using Actions. We have implemented in that way.

alexpavel

I think this idea can be merged with this:

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/Current-Date-and-Time/idi-p/46550

 

johan_vangerwen

Very usefull for for instance use case:

I have several customers which are monitoring projects. These projects have several milestones and milestone dates planned.

 

User Story for the customer:

I want to be notified if the planned milestone date is older than todays date because this helps me better and faster to find the projects which missed their milestone date(s).

 

Currently either a person is to maintain manually each day the Current Date in Anaplan or a script needs to be written to import the Current Date. A function for Current Date/NOW() will reduce manual maintenance and/or implementation effort and thereby simplify the process a/o technical solution

JASONDANIELSON

The ability to garner a current date or date time is critical functionality in any project and most use cases. I may not be speaking for the entirety of the community, but Im guessing a sizable percentage of the modelers care less about the how and more about the function. With performance considerations (of course) any viable method to pull the current date and/or date time would be a drastic improvement over what is available today and something that allows us to get this information directly from the system without additional build means we're focused on delivering results as opposed to spending time and effort to produce this data. Please consider adding this functionality asap.

DavidSmith

Today's date is coming......

JASONDANIELSON

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any details you can share? Timeframe, etc? Appreciate the feedback!

JaredDolich

@DavidSmith can't wait to see it!

 

DavidSmith

@JASONDANIELSON 

Briefly, a function that returns todays date (note not time), based on a timezone parameter.  The parameter will need to be hard coded, but we will provide the list of available time zones. So if you need multiple time zones, you create multiple line items in a system module (not dimensioned by anything)

I have a simple modelling trick to take those line items and model it to users (or any other dimension) in different timezones if needed

You will see an entry in history for the line item (and any dependant downstream formulae) as and when the values change

If you restore a model to a locked model, the value will not change until you change the mode to unlocked

We are hoping to get this out in Q3 if possible

 

We are not looking at time stamps at this point - The history logging alone would cause issues, but the use cases for time stamps are probably better addressed through different means than a function

I hope this helps

David 

JASONDANIELSON

@DavidSmithGreat news David and really appreciate the follow up! 

jasonblinn

Great news!! This will be very useful!

wquan

@alexpavel Agreed - the idea should be merged into the one you showed me as that's exactly the same requirement I'm looking for. As community boss, can you do this?

 

@angs75 Yep that's definitely a viable option whilst we don't have this sort of functionality!

vicky_ascencio

vicky_ascencio

Alessio_Pagliano

Hi, 

We currently have a workaround process and some relevant enhancements.

@DavidSmith , are there any updates on the timeframes? eg is this something that is planned to be released this/next month ? (safe harbour statements apply, I guess). 🙂

 

Thanks,

Alessio

DavidSmith

@Alessio_Pagliano 

All I can say is I'm pushing really hard to get this done, but it is not likely in the next few months, but hopefully will before the end of the year

 

Sorry that I can't say any more, but "you know the rules", I can say that it is a high priority

David