data in the ‘Source Release Date’ property is mainly stored as ‘dd mmm yyyy’ and even though this is a text, you can still cast it into varchar and then eventually to date, to do whatever querying you need. BUT, there’s quite a lot of data that doesn’t conform like ‘’, ‘April 24, 2003’ or ‘01 December 2004’. There’s no consistency, so workarounds to clear this up at query runtime are getting very messy.
There are 353 offending fixlets, which doesn’t sound that many as most of them are and the field only needs clearing up. I know that this means quite a lot of re-releases, but would be worth doing for the future.
Also sticking to the format from now on would help.
The BES Console normalizes all valid dates to a single display so we don’t run into this issue in the console, but we understand the annoyance it causes you when querying the database.
Hey Rad, thanks for the feedback. We do try to keep the date format standardized as much as we can, but as you pointed out, there are many inconsistencies. We will go through our existing content and fix these one site at a time, and will hopefully clear most of these issues over the next 4-6 weeks. A few things to note:
We do not have control over custom fixlet messages in the “actionsite”, those are generated and filled in by the BES console, so there will be two formats for the source release date that you’ll have to parse.
We will be keeping “” as a standard value, as some content do not have a “source release date” at all.
I noticed the “Updates for Windows Applications Beta” site is still subscribed, there is now a production site available and the BETA site is no longer being supported, we will not be updating the “source release date” fields in the BETA site.