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When running reports in Faculty Success, activities display if they occurred within the date range for which you ran your report. Date fields that are defined as "significant" are used to determine the start and end dates of each activity. There are often additional filters such as user, college, screen, etc., but these filters are generally applied after the initial date range filter. It’s important to understand how record dates are calculated and the role that significant dates play in in the process.
Record dates are calculated internally based on the significant dates on the screen. Faculty Success will associate a period of time to the record using the minimum possible date as the start date and the maximum possible date as end date. For example, if a Publication has a "date published" of 2016 (no month or day specified), the record will have internal start and end dates of January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016. These dates will then determine when the record appears in reports, based on if the dates overlap with reporting dates. These internal dates can be seen in Run Reports, "Create a new report" feature, by pulling a CSV.
Significant date fields must be entered in chronological order and by default, the system requires at least one significant date field be entered in order to save a record. This setting can be removed on a screen by screen basis, should you choose. (A screen revision work request is required to modify these settings.)
If a screen has only one significant date field, that field will be considered both the start and end date of the record. If a screen has exactly two significant date fields, it is possible for the record to be considered “on-going.” This occurs if the first date (start date) is filled in but the second date (end date) is left blank. In this case the internal record date will be calculated as Start Date- Present.
If a screen has more than two significant date fields, the system will not allow on-going behavior. There are several important things to keep in mind if you have more than two significant date fields on a screen:
- If only one significant date field has data entered, that date will be considered both the start and the end date of the record.
- If multiple significant date fields on the screen have data entered, whichever one appears first on the screen will be considered the start date and whichever appears last on the screen will be considered the end date of the record.
To better understand the way that multiple significant dates work with reporting, let’s take an example of a Contracts, Grants and Sponsored Research screen that has three significant date fields: Submitted Date, Funding Start Date and Funding End Date. Suppose a grant has the following dates:
Submitted Date: 2/10/2015
Funding Start Date: 7/1/2015
Funding End Date: 12/31/2015
You are running a report with the date range of 9/1/2015 to 5/31/2016
- If a user enters Submitted Date, Funding Start Date and Funding End Date, the record will span from the Submitted Date until the End Date. Using the example dates above, the record would run from 2/10/2015 to 12/31/2015 and would show up in the report since it overlaps with the date range selected.
- If a user doesn't know the Funding End Date and therefore enters only the Submitted Date and the Funding Start Date, those dates will be used as the start and end date of the record. Using the example dates above, the record would span from 2/10/2015 to 7/1/2015 and would not show up in the report.
- If a user enters only the Funding Start Date, that date will be used as both the start and end date of the record. Using the example dates above, the record would span from 7/1/2015 to 7/1/2015 and would not show up in the report.
As you can see, it is important to understand how significant dates affect reporting when working in Faculty Success.
For more information about how significant dates work, including how to tell what fields are significant, see Requiring Significant Dates and Date Fields.
