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Q: How do I do a relative date search in Reqest Tracker?
Context
- MIT's Request Tracker (RT) instance on help.mit.edu
- Should also apply to other Request Tracker installations
- Applies to analysts/consultants working on RT queues
- Does not apply to clients simply using RT to see their tickets
- You should be familiar with using RT's Query Builder to construct a query
Answer
Sometimes you want to do a relative date search, or search back a period of time from now rather than always limiting your search by specific dates.
Examples why you might want to do this
- Search through the last 30 days worth of tickets and re-use the same search to always get the last 30 days
- Construct a daily or weekly report as a saved search
- Look back N days without having to work out what date that was
RT's relative date syntax
You can use the following syntax instead of explicit dates in the date box when you use Query Build or in your query string if you use the Advanced search interface to type in your query directly. You can also use these forms to set dates in RT date boxes on a ticket screen, for example to make a ticket due 7 days from now, to set the "starts" date to two weeks from today, or to indicate that it took you 2 days to work on a ticket.
| count days | "count" is an integer. You would use this to indicate a duration, for example in a "time worked" field. You would not use it in searching except as part of a more complicated expression doing arithmetic. |
|---|---|
| count weeks | Same idea, but for weeks. |
| count months | You may begin to see a pattern... |
| count years | How many years did you work on this ticket? |
| dow after next | "dow" stands for "day of the week". You might use this to indicate a future point in time. For example you might use this to set the "starts" date of a ticket to the "monday after next" |
| dow | Just day of the week. Avoid this if possible as it relies on a global server setting specifying whether to interpret this as the the closest past day of the week, or the closest next day of the week. Use next dow instead. |
| next dow | The next specified day of the week. |
| today | Today's date. Note that RT does not seem to do GMT conversion correctly, so "today" actually turns over around 7PM EST. |
| tomorrow | Tomorrow, with the GMT caveat. |
| yesterday | Yesterday's date. Same GMT issue, so it's really yesterday's span from 7PM EST the day before until 7PM EST yesterday. |
| last dow | "dow" stands for "day of the week". You would most likely use this with the < or > operators, for example to pull up all tickets created after last Monday. |
| last week | Any date last week |
| now | Now. Usually only used as part of a more complicated date expression, otherwise you'll have very few matches, if any. |
| now + count units | "count" is an interger and "units" is something like "days" or "weeks". For example now + 2 days means exactly 48 hours from now. |
| now - count units | Same as above but for dates in the past. To search for things created within the last 24 hours, for example, look for "Created > 'now - 1 day'" |
| + count units | Basically like saying "today + count units" where "count" is a number and "units" is "days", "weeks", etc. Unlike "now", "today" starts at the beginning of the day. |
| - count units | Same as above, but for dates in the past. For example, searching for "Created > '-1 day'" is the same as searching for "Created = yesterday" (verify!) |
| count units ago | Same as "today - count units" |
Examples
Could use a few screen shots and examples here.
More information
This parsing is actually not done by RT itself. RT uses a Perl module called Time::ParseDate to do its date and time parsing. See the CPAN entry on Time::ParseDate for more information, including time formats and specifying time zones in absolute dates.
