Special Handling of Date Values

Analytica includes a set of Date Functions that let you create and manipulate date values and time values. Date values represent the number of days since Jan 1, 1900. A date value can also represent hours, minutes, seconds, and smaller units as a fraction of a day (digits after the decimal point). For example,

DateValue 0 is 1-Jan-1900
DateValue 1 is 2-Jan-1900
DateValue 1.5 2-Jan-1900:12:00:00

Common rounding functions and Sequence take an optional DateUnit parameter to work with dates:

• Floor(x, dateUnit: u): Rounds x down to the nearest integer equal or below x, if dateUnit is omitted. Or you can specify DateUnit to round down to the nearest (preceding or same date) that starts the year (Jan 1), quarter, or other time unit as shown below.
• Ceil(x, dateUnit: u): Rounds x up to the nearest integer equal or above x, if dateUnit is omitted. Or you can specify a DateUnit to round up to the nearest specified time unit.
• Round(x, dateUnit: u): Rounds x down to the nearest integer to x, if dateUnit is omitted. Or you can specify DateUnit to the units to which you
• Sequence(startD, endD, dateUnit: u): Generates a sequence of dates (or date-time) from startD to endD, using increments of dateUnit.
• DateAdd(d, offset, unit): Returns a date-time by adding offset (in specified units) to date d.

dateUnit can be any of these text values: - 'Y' for Year - 'Q' for Quarter - 'M' for Month - 'WD' for Weekday - 'D' for Day (default if dateUnit is omitted) - 'h' for Hour - 'm' for minute - 's' for second Note that Month is upper case 'M' and minute is lower case 'm'.

Examples

Round up to the next year: Ceil(MakeDate(2014, 12,17), dateUnit: 'Y') → 1-Jan-2015

Round to the nearest top of the minute: Round(Now(withTime:1), dateUnit: 'm') → 17-Dec-2014 11:32:00 AM

List the next 5 Groundhog Days: 
Sequence(MakeDate(2015,2,2), MakeDate(2019,2,2), dateUnit: 'Y')
  → [2-Feb-2015, 2-Feb-2016, 2-Feb-2017, 2-Feb-2018, 2-Feb-2019]
 
or equivalently,
DateAdd( 2-Feb-2015, 0..4, unit:'Y' )
  → [2-Feb-2015, 2-Feb-2016, 2-Feb-2017, 2-Feb-2018, 2-Feb-2019]

Creating Dates

It is possible to create a date value without help from any function. A value will be recognized as a date if it follows the syntax dd-EEE-yyyy

Where:

dd is one or two digits for day of month

EEE is a three character text code for the month in the default language set in the OS. (English in the example below)

yyyy is four digits for the year

Example

04-DEC-2015

The bare date syntax must be used on its own. It cannot be embedded within an expression.

To explicity define a date you can use one of the following functions:

• ParseDate()
• MakeDate()

Importing Dates

DbQuery() and SpreadsheetRange() can import date values into Analytica. Both recognize date type values in the source data.

By default, DbQuery does not convert these to dates when importing but you can change this preference using the DatesAsText parameter. More details here.

SpreadsheetRange() always preserves date values when they are imported. There are no optional parameters to think about in this case.

Dedicated Date Functions

The section above summarized special handling of dates using multi-purpose functions. Dedicated date functions are documented on the Date Functions page.