Dates not grouping as expected in tables

💬 App Building
1

Situation: I have a table where dates are not grouped as expected. It seems to be grouping against the original date-time instead of just the date.

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The setup:

  • Source data is in Unix time
  • Column, 'Due Date', in table is setup as type 'Date' with format 'dd MMM'
  • The table is then grouped by this due date

Expectation:

  • Grouping respects the formatting of the column and all 22 rows are grouped under Feb 19th

The 'exam question':

  • Is this expected behavior and should be compensated for in the source?
  • Or is this a bug?

If this is expected behaviour, am I the only one that doesn't see this as intuitive?

2

Hi @ferret141,

So I tried replicating this but it is working as expected for me:

Column with datetime as type:

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image642×539 39 KB

And then with date as type:

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I actually left the date format field alone. This shouldn't make any difference, but my created_at time's format is the following: 2024-12-10T18:17:00.233Z

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3

Thank you for trying to replicate it @MiguelOrtiz . It sparked a theory that panned out.

The root cause is "dirty" data. Unix time was stored as a string, not a number.

If you feed the table unix time as a number, it recognises it properly and respects column formats.
If you feed the table iso time as a string, it works as expected.
However if you feed it unix time as a string, it's smart enough to interpret it and display it as a date, but not smart enough to group against it.

Taking a guess, the grouping is done off the source data?

If you cannot correct it at the source and need a quick fix, something like {{ item * 1 }} in the table converts it into a number for the table to interpret correctly.

I don't know if this is a bug/feature request going forward, but it would be nice if the table could handle unix time as a string gracefully.

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4

Nice, good catch.

So, this morning I was working with groupings myself, focusing on the sorting (I had custom sorting in my data source but grouping defaults sorting to either Ascending or Descending). When I changed the values of my columns using "mapped value" the sorting changed, which makes me thing grouping isn't using source data, rather the values as rendered by the table (unless grouping and sorting use different data source as reference, but that is unlikely).

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5

Thank you both for sharing your troubleshooting process! Marking @ferret141's answer as a solution, so that it is visible to others. It looks like our team is further researching the way the table handles unix timestamps

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