Flow Condition greater than submission date

[Codymlvn]

Hello,

I have this flow, the user submits a Microsoft Form to trigger to order products. I am trying to setup a condition to prevent users from ordering dates that have already passed. I have been having problems with this condition stopping some dates that are in the future and allowing other dates through, it just doesn't seem consistent. 

[Pstork1]

Is there a specific reason why you are converting the submission time from UTC and the delivery time from Eastern?  I would look first to make sure that you aren't adding discrepencies based on using two different time zones for your calcuations.  Otherwise it looks about right.

For troubleshooting, have you checked the runs to see exactly what dates/times you are comparing?  That would be the first thing to check to make sure the data being compared isn't the problem rather than the comparison itself.

[Codymlvn]

The submission time is auto generated by the Microsoft Form and seems to be in UTC, the task time is manually entered just as a date. I was using the convert time task to format the string. 

I have checked the outputs and they are always correct, but the condition returns this as false even though the task is past the submission date. 

But here you can see when they resubmit for a date that has already passed, the condition allows it through

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Looking at your output my suspicsion is that you are doing a Text comparison rather than a date comparison.  Like you I would have thought the output of the conversion would be a DateTime string, but it looks like it might be producing a formatted text string instead.  That would throw off the comparison.  Let me play around with it a bit and see whether I can reproduce your issue.

[Codymlvn]

Are you thinking i might have to use an expression to format the output? I have seen other post reccomend comparing dates/time as ticks, but I am not familiar with using ticks.

Thanks for your help!

[Pstork1]

That may be the solution.  To use Ticks, just put your formatted Date/Time timespans inside the Ticks() function.  That will translate to actual numbers that can be compared more directly.  Other than that I haven't really been able to replicate your issue.  The other suggestion I would have would be to format your dates as full Date/Time strings so you can see what is being compared.

[Codymlvn]

So formating the long date seems to fix for any future vs. past, but now it's an issue for the same day

LayoutTest short dateTest long date

[Pstork1]

As I mentioned originally.  YOu'll have to make sure you aren't throwing off the comparison because you are converting one from UTC to Eastern and the other from Eastern to Eastern.  If you used the same date/time for both you would still end up with a 4 hour difference based on the conversion.  That may be enough to mess up the test for same day.

[Codymlvn]

I have removed the EST to EST convert and added a Compose action to format the DateTime, after testing on a recent one that failed it seems to be holding. I think the comparison was not comparing based on the format. Thank you for your help