2340173 - No Relative Select Or Value Help Entries For Date/Time Report Fields

You open a report ABC (where ABC represents the name of the report) and click the value help of a selection field which is a date. You notice that the value help does not offer you any values to choose from, as well as no relative selection like Yesterday etc is available.

Further, filtering on this date field is resulting on report timeout or performance issues.

• SAP Cloud for Customer
• SAP Business ByDesign

1. Go to the respective work center and open the report.
2. There is a date field in the selection. Click the value help.

No relative selections nor any direct values are offered.

If you try to filter on the related date field, you also experience performance issues or timeout errors.

The field in question is a field of type DATE_TIME. It does not only show a date, but a combination of date and time, for example 01.01.2016 00:00:00 UTC. For DATE_TIME fields, no value help entries nor relative selections can be supported. If we allowed entries here, the system would load a value for every second, for example:

01.01.2016 00:00:00 UTC

01.01.2016 00:00:01 UTC

01.01.2016 00:00:02 UTC

And so on.

Such values are not practical. Additionally, they would cause performance issues in the system, hence it is not supported.

For the same reason, using intervals (for example, between, greater than, or less than) is not practical when filtering on DATE TIME fields. Instead, it's advised that fields of type DATE are used for report filtering, relative selections or value help.

Date time fields in selections cannot be supported generally. Please note that for some fields it is possible to type in the values manually, however this is not a generic feature feasible for all date time fields. If it is supported for your field, please make sure you enter the spaces correctly between the date, time and time zone:

DD.MM.YYYY<space>HH:MM:SS<space>UTC.

In some cases, you can check if a field is of type DATE_TIME by proceeding as follows:

1. Go to the work center Business Analytics, view Design Data Sources.
2. Search for the respective data source and open the documentation (click the link in the Documentation column).
3. Look for your field and check the Characteristic ID.

If it ends with DATE_TIME, this document is applicable. Please note however, that this is not possible for all fields (i.e. some date time fields will have other characteristic IDs).

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