calculation to return specific day of the week/month

[KristenS_WF]

Hi All,

Most of our Content teams are already in Workfront, but we've got a Magazines team that's making the transition to WF in the coming weeks.  Individual articles will be set up as projects.  The team would like to be able to tell how articles are tracking against an issue deadline.

I'm trying to determine if an issue deadline can be created as a calculated field or if it will have to be manually entered.  Currently the magazine projects have a custom form that includes fields to specify the issue month and year--e.g., 'July' and '2023.'

I asked how issue deadlines are determined and was told that production deadlines fall on a Tuesday (they can be the first, second, or last Tuesday of the preceding month depending on the magazine) and that the page plan deadlines fall on the Friday before the production deadline.

Is it even possible to calculate these dates?  Or do we just need to add a field to the custom form for users to enter the issue deadline?

Thanks.

[Madalyn_Destafney]

I suggest having a project template for your articles (projects). If the process is mostly the same each article, definitely have a template or have a couple templates representing different article workflows.

You can use task predecessors and durations to set the flow of dates in your project. If you have a task in it that's considered the 'deadline' or the main task you're driving to in your project, you're able to see a task predecessor to say that deadline task is due 'the 2nd Tues after the file release task' for example, it would be 21(task # of the successor)fs+23w. 2=2nd,3=Tues,w=week.

Check out more here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/manage-work/tasks/task-duration-and-duration... and https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/manage-work/tasks/use-task-predecessors/lag-...

Is this answering your question? 

[KristenS_WF]

That sounds like an interesting concept, but I'm not sure that I fully understand the application (or that it gets the team what it wants).

If I understand the team correctly, they can have a group of articles/projects for a given magazine in process at the same time.  The templated workflows use Start Date as the schedule mode (as it may not be immediately known into what issue an article will be slotted).  Once the issue date is assigned, the team then wants to see if that project is tracking to the issue deadline (if the project is running late, the team may decide to bump the article to a later issue).

As an example, if the issue date for Magazine Alpha is July 2023, then the issue deadline is 6/6/23 (the first Tuesday of the preceding month).  We would likely build a report to show all Magazine Alpha projects slated for July 2023 and indicate if they're on track to complete by 6/6.

I found a Fusion guide for calculating the nth day of the week in a month and tweaked it to try and create calculated fields in a custom form.

I created a test custom form with two dropdown fields--'TEST Issue Month' (with month names as the labels and numbers--'01','02', etc. as the values) and 'TEST Issue Year.'  I then created two calculated fields:

TEST Issue Date Preceding Month

CONCAT(({DE:TEST Issue Month}-1), "/01/", {DE:TEST Issue Year}, " 5:00 PM")

TEST First Tuesday Preceding Month

ADDDAYS({DE:TEST Issue Date Preceding Month}, 1 * 7 - DAYOFWEEK(ADDDAYS({DE:TEST Issue Date Preceding Month}, -3)))

(I tried combining the calculations into one field, but the time value came out wonky.).  This seems to work--the second field yields Jun 6, 2023 5:00 PM--but I don't see any way to account for holidays.

This is a long-winded way of saying that it may make the most sense for us to just create a deadline field that the users have to manually enter.