...you are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike...
Sep 25 2007
This is the fourth in my series about dynamic date objects. The first three included objects for daily, weekly, and then monthly ranges. I am going to complete my collection of Oracle-based dynamic date objects by providing yearly objects in this post.
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part IV: Yearly Date Ranges”
Sep 12 2007
In the first post in this series I introduced the idea of dynamic date objects. The intent was to show how a universe designer can create dynamic date objects that can be used to schedule reports with a condition that changes over time. The first post covered the basic concepts and included “Today” and “Yesterday” dynamic date objects. The next post covered weekly ranges. In this post I will further extend the concept to monthly ranges. As with the other posts so far in this series I will be using Oracle functions.
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part III: Monthly Date Ranges”
Aug 30 2007
In the first post in this series I set up both regular objects and predefined condition objects that were based on the Oracle sysdate pseudo-column. These objects were designed to be used for scheduling reports with date conditions while allowing the date range to move forward in time for each new execution of the scheduled report. For that article I only created objects for Today and Yesterday. Today 
I will provide some weekly date ranges with the help of a few Oracle functions.
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part II: Weekly Date Ranges”
Aug 22 2007
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can’t imagine why…
With apologies to the rock group Chicago, but I could not help starting out this post with a quote from one of their most famous hit records. Yeah, I have records. Deal with it. 
I am going to start out this post with a very obvious statement. There are two ways to get reports: Interactive and Scheduled. Interactive reports can have prompts that allow me to specify which values I want to see, and many times those prompts will include dates or date ranges. Since they are interactive I can change the dates each time I run the report.
But what about scheduled reports? I would hardly want to schedule a report that always ran for August 22, 2007, right? I want that date parameter value to change. Maybe I want the report to always run for “yesterday” or “last week” or “the second Tuesday of the month” or anything along those lines. The challenge is, of course, that the value for “yesterday” changes each day I run the report. How do I hit that moving target?
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part I: Yesterday and Today”