Query for Attribute Date

J Baumann · July 2017

What am I missing? Trying to find everyone with a specific Attribute and a date within that Attribute in a "this month," "next month," - etc. just as you do for upcoming Birth dates. But it's note returning anything. Any thoughts?

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

First thought - are you querying on the correct attribute? Are you looking for a constituent attribute, gift attribute, address attribute.... You may have similar names for different attributes and happen to be looking for the wrong type.

Just ran two queries using this month and they pulled correctly for me. Do you have any other criteria?

Joanne Felci 2 · July 2017

Silly question - but does that attribute have values filled in the date field?

J Baumann · July 2017

Yes, it has a date in the Date field, and it's an Education Attribute. I've tried one single criteria in multiple ways: Date is this month, next month, next quarter. Nothing is returned. Only when I say Date is Not Blank do I get anything - but then I get everything and that's no help.

Ryan Hyde · July 2017

J Baumann:

Yes, it has a date in the Date field, and it's an Education Attribute. I've tried one single criteria in multiple ways: Date is this month, next month, next quarter. Nothing is returned. Only when I say Date is Not Blank do I get anything - but then I get everything and that's no help.

That's fascinating. So you've confirmed you're looking at the correct attribute and that the attributes do in fact have dates, so structurally speaking, there's nothing wrong with either your data or your query. I don't have the education module, so maybe this is a bug? It might be best to reach out to chat support and see if there's a known issue.

Joanne Felci 2 · July 2017

Have you tested using actual date values (like between 6/1/17 and 6/30/17)

J Baumann · July 2017

Joanne Felci:

Have you tested using actual date values (like between 6/1/17 and 6/30/17)

I have not. That would not be of any use to me. The Attribute Description is "Ordination Date" and we need to be able to find people who were ordained to ministry within particular months, not dates within one year. This RE DB was just converted by Blackbaud within the last week.

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

We don't have Education module either. Is it data there that you are trying to query or data entered under Relationships > Education?

I just plugged in some data under Relationships and query worked fine. Criteria > Relationships > Education > Attributes > Date - this month.

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

Just read your reply about "DB just converted." I suggest spot checking a couple records to see if the data is in the date field. Maybe dates were incorrectly mapped to comment/description. If you're looking at data in the description field and it's free text entry be sure your query is looking for exactly the same text. I would hope description converted as a table to make data entry consistent.

J Baumann · July 2017

JoAnn Strommen:

Just read your reply about "DB just converted." I suggest spot checking a couple records to see if the data is in the date field. Maybe dates were incorrectly mapped to comment/description. If you're looking at data in the description field and it's free text entry be sure your query is looking for exactly the same text. I would hope description converted as a table to make data entry consistent.

I manually added a date to two people just to see if the Query would find them - and it did not. I'm a 20-year user of RE, so this is defying logic.

Melissa S Graves · July 2017

This is where support comes in. A simple screen share should be able to help you identify where you went wrong (or worst case help BB identify a new "anomoly" (aka. bug)).

Ryan Hyde · July 2017

This is sounding more and more like a bug, though I'd be interested to know if dialing in a manual date range yields any results. I know this isn't useful for you in the end, but it would help to narrow down what's going wrong - is it that date field is not responding like a date for this type of attribute, or is it that the predefined date range call in the query itself not behaving as expected?

Ryan Hyde · July 2017

Oh, something just popped into my head, though this is probably not the case. It's possible to put info into the date field in such a way that it looks like a date to the human eye but RE can't translate it.

For instance, it is possible to enter data in that looks like YYYY.MM.DD into a date field, but if you do that, RE will not parse it as a date. Similarly YYYYMMDD or YYYYDDMM with no characters separating the elements will result in a string rather than a date. Is it possible you data is just formatted badly?

Melissa S Graves · July 2017

What does this mean? "we need to be able to find people who were ordained to ministry within particular months, not dates within one year"

Are you trying to get all Ordinations in July (of any year)? If so - then last month does not work that way. In fact, only birthdate has this capability to query on a single month no matter what year it is in. Is this what you are hoping for?

Query for Attribute Date

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