Shamrock CRM – Salesforce.com Consulting, Implementations and Web Development

Modifying Salesforce.com Dates Using Javascript

CAUTION:  Technical jargon!!! Non-Business Related!!! Only interesting for Salesforce Developers.  :)

I ran across this interesting little problem while creating an orchestration in Cast Iron. I was creating a custom function that would adjust dates forward and back by weeks at a time.

What I found was, my small piece of code worked flawlessly 75% of the time. The 25% of the time would return a calculated date, or error, of “NaN-NaN-NaN.” I could not figure out what was wrong. I tested the code in the browser and everything worked properly.

From further testing and analysis, I determined that the code only broke when the month was July, August, and September or the day was the 7th, 8th, or 9th. I thought that this was very odd.

The code was taking a standard Salesforce date string formatted like “YYYY-MM-DD”, parsing out the text for the year/month/day, and using the parseInt Javascript function to convert the year/month/day into numeric values. I then created a Date object in Javascript and then made the date modifications.

Well, it turns out that parseInt is a bit quirky. If you do parseInt(“06″), this will return the number 6. If you do parseInt(“09″), this will return 0. ZERO?!?! Yes, 0. This is because parseInt will expect the number to be in Octal format if there is a 0 in front. There is no 09 in Octal. This causes the code to return 0, instead of the expected 9. So, when I subtracted 1 from the month to put the month in proper Javascript Date format, my code was inserting -1 as the month, therefore creating an invalid date. This only happened for the 7th, 8th and 9th months.

To resolve this, it was very simple. All you need to do is add “, 10″ after the number to parse into an Integer (declaring a Radix) and it will consider this number to be of Base 10, solving your issue.  So, the correct code would be parseInt(“09″, 10).

To learn more about Javascript date modification for Salesforce.com S-Controls, take a look at this W3 Schools link.