Cannot calculate DateDiff using a custom date field in JPD

Adam Sigel

I am trying to calculate a "Days in [Status]" field in Jira Product Discovery and can't seem to get an output for my formula.

I want to reference a custom date field that indicates the beginning of a project status and re-calculate the days in status on a daily basis with Jira Automation. I've been debugging and checking other posts in the community but have still not been able to solve this.

Here's what I have in debug now:

Now is: {{now.jiraDate}} and Discovery Kickoff is {{issue.customfield_10239.match(".*start.*([0-9]{4}-[0-9]+-[0-9]+)")}}

This works as expected and outputs:

Now is: 2024-10-07 and Discovery Kickoff is 2024-09-03

However, the next line I have for debugging fails:

Date Diff is: {{now.JiraDate.diff(issue.customfield_10239.match(".*start.*([0-9]{4}-[0-9]+-[0-9]+)")).days.abs}}

Returns this:

Date Diff is:

I've tried every formatting combination I'm familiar with and I cannot get this formula to give me a number of days since the Discovery Kickoff date. Any help is hugely appreciated!

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Adam Sigel 

When you used the match() function to extract from the JPD date field format, that results in a text value.  Please add a toDate call after that to convert before the use in diff():

Date Diff is: {{now.JiraDate.diff(issue.customfield_10239.match(".*start.*([0-9]{4}-[0-9]+-[0-9]+)").toDate).days.abs}}

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/examples-of-using-smart-values-with-dates/#Converting-text-to-dates

Kind regards,
Bill