#happy2022workday day-028

Happy 2022 day-028! Today’s update…
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EVX: EValuate eXpression
LVD: Lookup Value as of Date
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Continuing yesterday’s discussion about determining whether or not a worker has changed their name, we are also going to soon learn why the Report Specific Calculated Fields (RSCF) “feature” was added. There was a reason the RSCF option was created back when all CFs were System Wide Calculated Field (SWCF).

The story is that one Workday customer needed to create hundreds of calc fields for 1 large change detection report. This was back before connectors existed (such as Core Connector Worker) for change detection.
Workers appeared in the report only if they had changed their name, address, title, or several dozens of other fields. In the report output, the new value appears only if that particular field was changed. So, if their name changed but their address did not change, the name column displayed their new name, and the address columns were blank.

The handling of “display-only-new-values-and-otherwise-blank” was done with the EValuate eXpression (EVX) CF function type, which we will look into soon. But, notice from the picture that EVX and LVD can return any type, even single and mult-instance values.

In yesterday’s post, we saw how by using a report filter we can show only workers who have changed their preferred first name. Today we will instead use a True/False Condition (TFC) calc field because we might also want to detect if workers have changed their last name, or even their middle name, either their legal or preferred. You can see how without using CFs the report filter could grow and get quite complex.

The complexity is still there, but with CFs it will be easier to separate the change detection by field as compared to using parentheses in a huge report filter.

We will follow yesterday’s comment from Matilda Elf about creating a LVD for both the start and end dates of a window of time. Today, instead of preferred first name, let’s go with legal last name (those are not exact spellings of the field names.)

CF1: LVD for start date
CF2: LVD for end date
CF3: TFC set to true if CF1 is not equal to CF2

Essentially, CF3 is true if a worker’s legal last name on the start date is not the same as their legal last name on the end date.

CHALLENGE: How many calculated fields would it take to determine if a worker has changed their address during a specified window of time, where we need to check these 5 address fields (not exact spelling): Address line 1, Address line 2, City, State or Province, and finally Postal Code.

CLARIFICATION: If only one of the 5 address fields change, that still counts as an address change. This example comes from a class I taught back when I was a Workday employee. Somebody mentioned that they changed apartments in the same building, so they changed only their Address line 2.