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”.
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
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.
@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.
