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
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.
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.
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)
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.
I have several customers which are monitoring projects. These projects have several milestones and milestone dates planned.
User Story for the customer:
Iwant 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
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.
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
@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!
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). 🙂
I would like to post an update on, this as I am aware we have not communicated any news on this for a while. We are still planning on implementing a TODAY() type function that will allow the current days date to be returned (with a parameter to specify the timezone). This won't be delivered into production until next year (2022) though. There is a significant amount of complication with this function as it would be the first function whose returned value would change without any other user action. We have chosen to prioritise releasing the Enhanced Calculation Engine (with native support for sparse data sets) before we release the TODAY function next year.