Subtracting Dates

[ClevelandKate]

Good morning. Using Report Studio in Cognos 8. I'm a whiz at Excel but those rules don't all aply in Cognos. Anyway, I'm largely self taught and making progress, but this is one of those things that I'm sure is very simple, but I can't find it.

My boss wants a report that compares two time fields. One is a time given by a vendor when he claims he made a delivery. The second is the time our location reports receiving the delivery.

Field format is MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS

ex: 4/1/2012 8:56:00 PM and 4/1/2012 9:33:00 PM
I'd like to be able to calculate the difference in minutes, for this one it would be 37, and then filter the report to only show items with a diff of over 60 mintes.

I'm sure there's a function to subtract the dates, but everything I've tried just errors out.

Any suggestions?

K8

 

[blom0344]

I would write an extended expression using the Cognos extract function. You can extract year,day,hour and minute from a timestamp and convert this to an overall figure in minutes.

The complexity lies in the difference between the 2 dates. If only the time component differs than it is a matter of calculation hours*60+minutes and subtracting the two numbers accordingly..


Ties Blom