Forum Discussion

jrossausiscom's avatar
jrossausiscom
Qrew Assistant Captain
7 years ago

ToDays does not behave as shown

I cannot get ToDays to work for the life of me.  All of the examples I see include a - or Minus sign, but the formula rejects this.

What QB says:
"Example: ToDays([Start Date] - Today()) returns the number of days until the Start date."

But the field errors off and says the operator cannot be used on date time fields.  If I change it to a comma, this error goes away but then it doesn't like either or of the fields.

Error: "Expecting Duration but found date"

Why does it want a duration?  I want the number of days between two dates, so giving it a duration makes no sense.
Formulas and functions
  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    7 years ago
    The ToDays function expects to see a calculation that involves date fields and nit date/time field types .  It sounds like your field(s) are in fact a date / time field type.  So you could either need to change that field type to be a date field type or else change the formula to

    Todays((ToDate([Start Date]) - Today())

     If you post your actual formula I can help further.



  • jrossausiscom's avatar
    jrossausiscom
    Qrew Assistant Captain
    7 years ago
    Alright, I ended up realizing that you can use the minus sign if you change the field type to Formula Duration.  Now it works perfectly.

    So what is ToDays for?
  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    7 years ago
    ToDays concerts a Duration type result to numerical field type of of days.

    A duration field type has the concept of the elapsing of time but often when you were trying to use it in formulas you might want that converted to a numeric field and have it converted say to the number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks. The concept of a Duration field doesn�t inherently have a natural unit of measure, it is just a sense of the elapsing of time.