Sometimes it's useful to filter your data by a floating date. For example, if you want to create a View that shows you all the Properties that were conserved in this year, you could enter a range between January 1st and December 31st of this year. But, next year you'd have to update your View to use the current year.
Instead of using fixed dates in your Views, you can use floating dates. Floating dates are specified using words instead of actual dates. In the previous example you'd would specify your date range instead as "This Year Start" and "This Year End." Then, it won't matter when you run the View, it will use whatever the current year is.
To use floating dates, you must set the date picker to Floating.
After you set the date picker to Floating you will have 3 fields to set.
The first field is the time period offset and will be set to zero automatically. Zero means that you want the current time period - or This. If you want the previous period, then you would set it to -1, or 1 if you want the next period. You can set the value to add or subtract any number of units from the time period you select in the time period field.
The second field is the time period and will be set to Day automatically. 0 Day means Today. -1 Day means Yesterday. 1 Day means Tomorrow. You can set the time period to Day, Week, Month, Year, or Fiscal Year.
The last field is the particular moment of the time period to use. It will automatically be set to To Date, which means right now. So, no matter what your time period is set for, To Date means that the date and time used in the View will be the precise moment you run the View. Start, on the other hand, will use the very beginning of the time period and End will use the very end.
If we use our original example of wanting to see all the Properties conserved "This Year," we would create a query row that looks like this:
We want the query to start at the very beginning of the current year and end at the very end. So, we choose Start and End, respectively, for the moment fields.
Floating dates are great for Saved Reports. If your executive director likes to run a monthly report of all active projects for the board, you don't have to continuously update the View behind the Saved Report. Every time the report is run, it could use the current month.
Floating dates are also great for Dashboard Widgets for the same reasons.
Here are some more examples of floating dates. Note that in many cases the same query could be defined a couple of different ways, although technically they are subtly different:
"Within the last 30 days"
This query would technically capture future items too:
or
Would capture them strictly within the last 30 days.
"Within the last month"
(this technically captures future entries too)
"Within this month"
"Within this fiscal year"
*Also note that you can define your fiscal year in settings.
"Since the beginning of the year"
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