DateTime Column is recognised as string in BIRT

Dear community.
I have several DateTime columns in my KNIME dataset. Unfortunately, once I feed my dataset into BIRT using the 'Data to Report (BIRT)" node, all the DateTime columns become string and I cannot really use them properly anymore.
Is there a way to make BIRT recognise the DateTime columns from KNIME?

What I want to achieve in the end is to use the formatter in BIRT (e.g.
Formatter.format(row[“timestamp”], “yyyy-MM-dd”) ) to format my DateTime field, so that I see something more readable than “2024-09-04T08:17:44.881094”.

Hello @M_a_t_t

Welocme to KNIME Community!
It would be good to see sample dataset you have a problem with.
Nevertheless, the first thing coming to my mind is that your DateTime columns contains strings, even if you expect them to contain dates/times. I would apply ‘String to Date&Time’ node to be sure about data type (or get any error message). But this is just silly suggestion :slight_smile:

Happy KNIMEing!

1 Like

Thanks for your reply @Kazimierz . My columns contain only timestamps. I am afraid I cannot provide a reasonable sample data set because my data comes directly from a postgres database, and exporting to excel does not preserve the data types of the columns.
I ran some tests and I noticed that all Date/Time columns (they either have the “Zoned Date Time” or “Local Date Time” Column Type in KNIME) are not automatically recognized as Date/Time columns in BIRT. They are all string columns in BIRT. Is this different for you?
What I noticed then tough, is that my Zoned Date Time column could be converted to a Date/Time Column in BIRT. However, the column I needed was the “Local Date Time” column, and this one could not be converted.

What I noticed then is the column in question comes in an maybe unusual format of 2024-09-09T10:46:05.056831 that might be not recognized by BIRT. I then used string manipulation in KNIME to remove the last 3 digits to get e.g. 2024-09-09T10:46:05.056, which I could then convert to a Date/Time column in BIRT.

So I have it working now, but I still think that there is something not fully correctly working when passing dateTime columns from KNIME to BIRT.

My KNIME version is 5.2.5 by the way.

@M_a_t_t I’m on holidays now and can’t play with KNIME too much. However, I would suggest to check if there are any missing dates. If so, I would replace them with some dummy date then. But this is just my guess, with no tests done.

Nevertheless, it’s good you are able to work with your workflow now.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.