2029 Date Bug Fix

[James Valles]

Hi,

I know we are several years away, but do you guys have a plan to allow us to post past the year 2029? Currently, we are not able to as any date set to after 12/31/29 is recorded as previous century.

Thanks.

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

Thanks for clarifying.  Once I realized this was a custom field, I set out to recreate this problem.  Indeed, in my Jira 7.5.0 server version, was able to recreate a problem here that I think you are seeing.

I created a new custom field of type Date Picker.  The problem I found though was that by default Jira is tending to use only a 2-digit value for the year.   So when the date format of dd/mm/yy is presented as 05/05/30, Jira doesn't have enough precision in this setup to know if the year is 1930 or 2030.   What makes this more of a problem is that the date picker presents a menu of you to select the year, so even if you choose the 2030 year, that data is getting only stored in the 2 digit format.  Which in turn can lead to confusion that this is supposed to be a 1930 date.

But while looking at this, I did find there are some system settings you can adjust in Jira now to completely avoid this problem.  I found there are two different locations in the Jira system admin menu where you would have to change the date formats that include year to switch them from 2-digit (yy), to a 4-digit (yyyy) for both storage and display purposes.

1. Cog Icon -> System -> General configuration -> Advanced settings:

In this case I had to change 4 values on this page (java and javascript date pickers).   For the java ones you can just change the 'yy' to 'yyyy', but for the javascript entries, the syntax is different, you have change '%y' to '%Y'.

2. Cog Icon -> System -> User Interface -> Look and Feel

I would also suggest updating the Date/Time Formats on the look and feel page.  In these cases the change is simply increasing the year 'yy' to be 'yyyy'.

After I made these changes in my system, that date picker field now appears to be able to handle these date inputs and maintain the value the user entered more accurately.

[Sara Lam]

Thank you for the great suggestion.  Unfortunately, if user entered the 2-digit year manually, Jira treats it as 00xx.  This may cause bigger problem.  Does anyone have solution for that?

[Saravanan Sekar]

Hi @Sara Lam are you still facing this issue or if you have resolved this isse can you please help me . We are facing same issue with 00xx.

[Sara Lam]

Hi @Saravanan Sekar , we changed to 4-digit year format per Andy's instructions.  Users are used to the 4-digit year format too.

[Saravanan Sekar]

Hi @Sara Lam thanks for the quick response, But we too have 4-digit year format but issue is that it take 0023 if i enter say for example 01/01/23 

Jira output is as 01/01/0023. ANy idea on this ?

[Sara Lam]

@Saravanan Sekar , the problem didn't get resolved.  We need to use dates past 2031 so we had to use the 4-digit format and make sure users changed their behaviour by entering 4-digit year format.

Here is one of the outstanding tickets that was created in 2013 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-31291

[Saravanan Sekar]

@Sara Lam Thank you 

[Manjushree Zope]

Thank you Andy. The solution you had provided worked very well at our end.

[James Valles]

Great! Thank you very much for your due diligence. :) I will try that out. Hopefully this post will help out others in the future. 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi James,

Could you please let us know which product you are referring to here?  (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, etc)   It would also help if you could let us know if this is an Atlassian Cloud product or if you are running a self-hosted server version of that product.  

With this information we can then at least better categorize this concern so that the proper teams address this.

I was not able to find any such limitation in the products that I tested.

[James Valles]

Sorry for the late reply. I am referring to JIRA and this will be running on a self-hosted server version of the product. 

Thank you. 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi James,

Thanks for letting us know.  I can't seem to recreate this kind of limitation on my Jira 7.5.0 server edition.   I am curious to learn exactly what field are you trying to set where you see this limit?  Is this a custom date/time field, a due date, or some other custom field?

What version of Jira are you using right now?

[James Valles]

Hey there,

Thanks so much for getting back to me! We upgraded Jira from v6.4 to v7.4.0 .  So the issue we were seeing was with v6.4. 

This is a custom date field called "end date." We get the error when editing an existing issue and changing the date.

We recently upgraded to v7.4.0, so I am going to do some additional testing and will let you know if the limitation exists.

Thank you so much for your outstanding support!