redundant date comparison operators in workflow conditions

In workflow conditions that involve date fields:

It seems that the options:

• less than days later = In less than
• more than days later = In More than

At least it seems so from WorkFlowScheduler::_parseValueForDate (I rearranged the position of the case clauses in order to make the comparison easier):

If that is the case we should get rid of them. It makes configuring workflows confusing and error prone.

@ruben.estrada I will review this.

Great! Thanks!

mentioned in merge request !574 (merged)

@ruben.estrada Updated these comparators to check with datetime fields as well.

Status changed to closed

Hi @uma.s

Sorry for asking, but what is conceptually the difference between "less than days later" and "In less than" (or between "more than days later" and "In more than")? When would I use one and when the other?

On the other hand, I think this if clause is unnecesary (the same thing is done in the last else clause): https://code.vtiger.com/uma.s/vtigercrm/blob/be94f898759fe88d06efb5bd77455dfbeaa8adfa/modules/com_vtiger_workflow/WorkFlowScheduler.php#L386

Thanks Uma!

@ruben.estrada i think the interpretation is what leads to confusion. The "less" bit should call "between or not more" Is this correct @uma.s ?

@manuelgit the diagram is excellent. But there, how would you represent "In less than" and "In more than"? My original point is that those two are equivalent to, respectively, "Less than X days ago" and "More than X days later" in your diagram, making them redundant, unnecessary and confusing. In my mind, the solution was just to delete the "In less than" and the "In more than" options. But Uma left them there. Hence my question.

@uma.s that's why I asked the question of when to use one and when to use the other. I don't think an end user would know the difference (even I don't know the difference and I'm supposed to be a developer with a a few years of experience in vtiger both as developer and as an end user, hahaha)

@ruben.estrada without looking into the code i would say: "In less than" would be from Current day (start yellow including blue) backward and "In more than" from Current day (start green including red) forward. But i got you...

@ruben.estrada Thanks! for the alert on duplicate code correction.

Here we can notice that the basic difference between these comparators is inclusion of Time frames based on field types with between comparators. @manuelgit diagrams holds good for these comparators.

mentioned in merge request !582 (merged)

Hi Uma, sorry to insist, but it is still confusing.

When you have a Date Field more than days later and in more than are exactly the same. Why would you want two different operators that do the exact same thing?

I feel that it would be like having an operator called "more than" and an operator called "greater than" that do exactly the same but for numbers.

@ruben.estrada No issues, I will consider this to review again.

Thanks!

Milestone changed to 7.3