yearsAgo produced strange date for individual user.

[rlatorre]

I have a UI Action that produces knowledge articles for the changes related to a release. I use the following to calculate the "valid_to" date on the article record:

gr.valid_to = gs.yearsAgo(-7);

This as work consistently for over a year but a single user has reported and issue. On more than one occasion, the date for this user calculated to "0184-09-01" when it was expected to be "2025-01-16". I have been able to reproduce the issue but not consistently.

Can anyone shed some light on this behavior?

[rlatorre · Accepted solution]

It turns out "GlideSystem" Date and Time Functions can cause unexpected behaviour when used for setting fields, as gs.yearsAgo returns a date in a constant format, designed to be used for database queries instead. 

Use the "GlideDateTime", "getDate", and "getDisplayValue" instead.

[rlatorre]

Any ideas or does this warrant an incident.

[rlatorre · Accepted solution]

It turns out "GlideSystem" Date and Time Functions can cause unexpected behaviour when used for setting fields, as gs.yearsAgo returns a date in a constant format, designed to be used for database queries instead. 

Use the "GlideDateTime", "getDate", and "getDisplayValue" instead.

[Hari haran · Accepted solution]

You can use this Script Include to get the Years ago date.