Can you change a field's type from Date to Timestamp?

Questions
1

I have an auto-enter date field. It's just the creation date. I'd like it to be a creation timestamp from now on. Can I simply change the data type? When I update clients in the future, they will of course have dates in this field, but moving forward the creation would be a timestamp.

Is this a problem? I've been playing around with it, and everything seems to work fine. When I view a timestamp field with a date via GetAsNumber, it just fills out the number with 0's. Everything (sorts, etc...) seem to 'just work'. I'd rather not have to change existing data to timestamps by adding some arbitrary time (i.e. 12:00:00 AM or whatever).

Thanks.

2

Yes, you'll be OK. As you've noticed, the time component for existing records will be filled with zeros.

1 Like
3

Thanks Malcom. I also did due diligence with FMPerception, and the one thing I forgot about is that I use this date in a few formulas (i.e. Creation_Date + 7 = 1 week from the creation date). I'll need to correct those, but otherwise it's nice to know that this change will just work.