Hi,
I feel that the new KNIME AP 5.5. Date&Time Range Creator that has replaced the now-deprecated Create Date&Time Range node has got slightly more powerful but in doing so has moved away from every-day usefulness without offering a direct functional replacement for the deprecated node.
By way of explanation… the new node is a general replacement for the old, but configuring both the old node and the new node to return the current date and time (returning 1 row, and set to use “execution date & time”), this is the result of each:
The old node was better for what I would consider the everyday use case of wanting the current date & time.
The new node now provides a greater level of granularity for the returned time, but it does not now seem possible to get the current date and time without it including fractional seconds down to “hundreds of nanoseconds” (the final two digits are always zero).
Whilst I can see that there may be some use cases that would suit the inclusion of fractional seconds, would it not be better to make their inclusion optional, so that the new node can then fully replace the deprecated node without now requiring the involvement of other nodes to strip off the partial seconds.
(for info, in 5.5., the old node can be found by searching in the Modern UI node palette for Create Date&Time Range //deprecated)
Inconsistent nanosecond handling
On a related note, I’m not sure I understand the logic of automatically returning date time supposedly to the “nanosecond” whilst only allowing the user to manually start and end ranges at the millisecond. That feels inconsistent, and if you were processing input data with dates at nanosecond granularity, it would not be possible to configure the start and end point of such date ranges, even though the node will generate nanoseconds in the intermediate values.