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SOLVED

Day of updates shown on Alteryx Connect Recent Activity incorrect

JoTP
8 - Asteroid

Today is Wednesday, I noticed that a change I made on Monday is showing as "Yesterday at 16:15" when I know it definitely wasn't made yesterday as I wasn't in the office.


How are the times/dates calculated on here? Is this likely to be a timezone/setup issue (we are in New Zealand)? Today's updates correctly show as updated "x hours ago".

 

Can anyone from Alteryx shed some light on this?

 

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6 REPLIES 6
VojtechT
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi @JoTP ,

 

I presume this is caused by the fact that your Connect server is in US while you are in New Zealand. Could you clarify that?

If that is the case, there is currently no solution, since Connect currently does not support timezone of user and has only one global datetime that is inherited from the OS. 

 

If the above is not the case, then I would be interested in what is the actual time set on the machine, where Connect runs. Sometimes this can be a cloud instance with some default timezone, that is different from the users. In such case the easiest solution would be to set the time of the machine to the proper one for you. If it's possible. 

 

Are you able to see the log of Connect, i.e. go to Administration? In the log, you can see what is the time in which the event happened. And that tells you what is the global time settings.

Vojta T., PM for Data Connectors
Try our Beta data connectors at https://bit.ly/3Ae8HgY
JoTP
8 - Asteroid

Hi @VojtechT 

 

The server is in a different city, although it is still in New Zealand on the same time zone. 

 

I logged into Administration and went to log, and the latest logs have the current time, so I don't think it is that either....

 

Jo

JoTP
8 - Asteroid

Interesting update! I just went and looked at the recent updates to see what it shows and TODAY it shows that the update was done on Monday correctly!! So perhaps there is some code that just doesn't handle the updates that were two days ago correctly????

 

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VojtechT
Alteryx
Alteryx

Interesting. Seems like the calculation of "yesterday" is not working all right. Might be rounding issue or something like that. Thank you for pointing this out. We will investigate. 

Vojta T., PM for Data Connectors
Try our Beta data connectors at https://bit.ly/3Ae8HgY
VojtechT
Alteryx
Alteryx

I think I found the reason. The whole "smart" datetime is working based on a difference between actual datetime and the datetime of the event. 

The thing is that even while the difference between e.g.

1) Mon 8:00 and Mon 20:00 or

2) Mon 20:00 and Tue 8:00

is in both cases "12 hours", in one case you expect "12 hours ago" while in the second case you expect "Yesterday". And these two cases cannot be handled by the same calculation, in my opinion. 

 

In a similar way your Connect evaluated the difference as "yesterday", because the difference was actually e.g. 44 hours which was rounded down to "1 day" and that fulfilled condition 

if (diffDays == 1) {

 

 

This is a result of my personal investigation and since I am not developer, I cannot guarantee it really is the root cause of the bad behaviour. 

But we should definitely be able to fix it for the next release.

Vojta T., PM for Data Connectors
Try our Beta data connectors at https://bit.ly/3Ae8HgY
JoTP
8 - Asteroid

Thanks @VojtechT . It isn't a huge thing, just annoying, so if it can be fixed that would be great.