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Enhance Auto Field Tool to Include Better Date Time Data Type Detection

With the increase number of JSON feeds and the need to properly define the data type for date and date/time fields. It would be useful to have the Auto Field tool detect common date and date/time formats from Strings and assign the Date, Date Time, or Time data type.

 

Given the following input data:

 

 

The select tool confirms is a String

 

 

If we use the Auto Field as:

 

The result is still a String data type (2nd Select Tool)

 

 

I would expect this to be Date Time.

 

One solution would be to create a formula and parse it, but this is not suitable for situations that the field names are unknown.

 

It would be much easier to have the work done by Auto Field.

 

4 Comments
Community_Admin
Alteryx
Alteryx
Status changed to: Inactive
 
Community_Admin
Alteryx
Alteryx

The status of this idea has been changed to 'Inactive'. This status indicates that:

 

1. The idea has not had activity in the form of likes or comments in over a year.

2. The idea has not reached ten likes.

3. The idea is still in the 'New Idea' status. 

 

However, this doesn't mean your idea won't be implemented! The Community can still like and comment on this idea. With enough renewed interest, this idea can be brought back into the 'New Idea' status. 

 

Thank you for contributing to the Alteryx Community and the Alteryx Product Idea Boards!

SeanAdams
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

This seems to be a useful idea - if I understand correctly, you're suggesting that AutoField be augmented to look for dates with common formats and then auto-types and auto-converts these?

Makes sense, and it would speed up quite a lot of data cleansing.

 

 
jyeh
7 - Meteor

A python implementation would be:

 

import datefinder

 

text = "If there is a date here, Sunday, July 23, 2022, the following should return it"

 

result = datefinder.find_dates(text) # datetime (2022, 07, 23, 0, 0)