Advent of Code is back! Unwrap daily challenges to sharpen your Alteryx skills and earn badges along the way! Learn more now.
Free Trial

Weekly Challenges

Solve the challenge, share your solution and summit the ranks of our Community!

Also available in | Français | Português | Español | 日本語
IDEAS WANTED

Want to get involved? We're always looking for ideas and content for Weekly Challenges.

SUBMIT YOUR IDEA

Challenge #46: Formatting a Date from an Integer

GeneR
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

The link to last week’s exercise (exercise #45) is HERE

 

I love to share real world use cases as exercises.  This week’s exercise comes from a customer that had data coming from in a legacy system and needed to transform the date field for a new system.  It is a straightforward exercise but shows how easily Alteryx can apply business logic to most any data transformation problem.

 

Use case: The Input contains dates formatted as year, month and day. In this case, the first character determines if the year should begin with 19 or 20.   If the first character is 0 then the year starts with 19, and when the first character is 1 the year starts with 20.  The remainder of the date following the 0 or 1 is the remaining year digits followed by month followed by day.

 

Objective: Please convert these strings into date formatted field.

Joe_Mako
12 - Quasar

How about a formula expression of: DateTimeParse(Switch(Left([date],1),'','0','19','1','20')+Right([date],6),'%Y%m%d')

LBhat
5 - Atom

exc47.PNG

one more approch 

TaraM
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

A solution has been posted

Spoiler
2016-10-31 11_06_46-Alteryx Designer x64 BETA - DataPrep_DateFormat_Solution.yxmd_.png
Tara McCoy
SeanAdams
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Same approach as provided by @LBhat 

NicoleJohnson
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

My solution...

 

But someone please tell me I'm not crazy, and that this is exactly the same problem as Challenge #58... right?? I am doing these challenges in a bit of a random order, but I am having a total twilight zone moment because i JUST did this one, I kid you not, earlier today. :)

 

Rather than taking the easy way out, I took at shot at the one-tool formula method (basically just trying to be in the same cool one-tool club as @Joe_Mako from #46 and @MarqueeCrew & @JoeM from #58...). Took a few tries (dates are not my forte), but eventually figured it out. 

 

Spoiler
WeeklyChallenge46.JPG
GeneR
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
There was a duplicated assignment.

Gene Rinas
estherb47
15 - Aurora
15 - Aurora

Had fun with this one. Broke it into 2 steps in the formula tool to have shorter formulas to audit. Similar/same solution as others

LordNeilLord
15 - Aurora

Nice & simple

 

Spoiler
Weekly Challenge 46.png
mceleavey
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Working through the backlog of these as I get the chance.

Is it wrong to do these challenges in my free time, in place of going outside and interacting with the "real" world?

I need to get out more...

 

Spoiler
I simply wrote a formula to replace the first character of the date string with 19 or 20 according to if it is a 0 or 1.
I then parsed the date and dropped the extra column.

Solution.PNGResults.PNG


Bulien