Using str2date with strings that also contain a time

Question

I have a method which, given an .NET XmlNode containing an ISO 8601 date in the inner text, will convert it to an X++ date object.

if (CLRInterop::isInitialized(childNode))
{
    return str2Date(childNode.innerText(), 321);
}
else return maxDate();

This works great if supplied a string which contains only a date (eg: 2019-03-21), but as soon as a time is also provided in this string (eg: 2019-03-21T00:00:00), it will return nothing.

The easiest fix for this would be just to strip everything past the first 10 characters, but this would break again if for some reason the string only contains 2 characters for the year. Is there a more robust way of handling strings including times in a call to str2date?

Answer 1

I just wrote this job with a bunch of examples. The very first line might be what you want. You can just create this as a new job in AX and then put a breakpoint on the first line and step through each to see what happens, or modify to experiment.

It looks like your string is standard ISO format, which I cover below various ways too.

static void DateTimeJob(Args _args)
{
    // This line looks about what you want
    utcDateTime     utcDateTimeFromString   = DateTimeUtil::anyToDateTime("2019-03-21T00:00:00");

    // ISO standard format. You can just assign it directly without quotes
    utcDateTime     utcDateTimeISOFormat = 2019-03-21T00:00:00;

    // Misc vars for below
    utcDateTime     utcNow;
    System.DateTime systemDateTime;
    date            dateOnly;
    str             systemDateTimeStr;

    // Look at
    // DateTimeUtil::<> // This has all sorts of useful functions
    // str2datetime() // May be useful to you
    try
    {
        // How to go from AX UTC to System.DateTime
        systemDateTime      = Global::utcDateTime2SystemDateTime(DateTimeUtil::utcNow());

        // How to go from System.DateTime to AX UTC
        utcNow              = Global::clrSystemDateTime2UtcDateTime(System.DateTime::get_UtcNow());

        // How to get ONLY the date portion from a UTC
        dateOnly            = DateTimeUtil::date(utcNow);

        // Cast to string for output
        systemDateTimeStr   = systemDateTime.ToString();

        // Output a few examples
        info(strFmt("%1, %2, %3",
                    systemDateTimeStr,
                    utcNow,
                    dateOnly));
    }
    catch (Exception::CLRError)
    {
        error(AifUtil::getClrErrorMessage());
    }    
}