Help Centre

To add a Date Output operation to your pipeline, open the ‘Add Operation’ popup and select ‘Date Output’.

The Date Output operation converts dates from Quantemplate’s standard format (Basic ISO ) to other formats for use in downstream systems, such as for a data warehouse or risk model.

Once dates have been reformatted in Date Output they will be treated as text and can no longer be used in date functions in Calculate. This operation should therefore be used after all required date calculations have been performed.

All values going into the Date Output operation must either be valid dates in Basic ISO format, or blanks Any other values will cause the pipeline run to fail. If using Date Output, it is strongly recommended to also use a Date Cleanse operation on your input data to validate, cleanse and convert all incoming dates.

Learn more about Working with dates in Quantemplate.

Define groups of input columns which share common settings for output format and output column.
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Define the date format the output values will be changed to, for example changing to or . Dates reformatted by Date Output will be treated as text by Quantemplate, so will not be compatible with date functions in Calculate.
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Set the output data to overwrite the source column, or write to a new column.
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Click to edit the operation name and description.

Search column names. Matching results in the Input Columns and Output Columns are highlighted.

To use Date Output, first add groups of input columns which share common settings for the output date format and output column.

Note that if new date columns are subsequently added upstream of the Date Output operation, the operation will need to be manually updated to include the new columns.

To select an output date format, click in the ‘Reformat as text’ column and select from the range of commonly used formats. These formats can be used to specify slash or dash separators.

To define a specific date format that is not included in the list of preset formats, click on the ‘Custom date format’ option. Select the desired date components from the suggestion list.

Custom formats in Date Output can be configured with any number or combination of supported components.

Custom formats can be copied and pasted between input groups within Date Output operations. Click the ‘Copy’ button in the custom format field, navigate to the custom format field in another input group and use to paste.

By default, the reformatted dates will overwrite the data in the original column. To write the data to a new column, click in the output column selector and select ‘New column’, then enter a column name. Quantemplate will warn if a new column name duplicates an existing output column name within the operation, which would result in that column being overwritten.

When configuring the output column for a group of input columns, a suffix can be defined. New columns will take the original column name plus the suffix. The default suffix is ‘_Output’.

New columns are created at the right edge of the output dataset.