How to check for an empty date field?

do you need to check it in forms or workflow?

Hi ‌,

you can use set a condition action to check date value is empty or not.

Thanks,

‌

Workflow

then both ways, yours and ‌'s bellow are valid.

Hi,

I've just been looking at this in Workflow 2016 and both Run If and Set a Condition do not allow you to select "is empty" when checking against a date field. I think only string values are allowed to checked for "empty".

‌, is this by design? Are there older versions of workflow that do allow "is empty" against a Date type.

have you checked with "Value" and date variable reference or with "Workflow Data" and date variable selected from dropdown?

the former allows to check for emptiness, the later not (at least in NW2013)

I think that's because DateTime type in .NET Framework is not nullable by default, so you can check for null in a CAML query with IsNull or IsNotNull (before you assign a value to a variable), but when you already have a datetime value, it's never empty.

Querying the column directly

does it allow you to change Condition dropdown to something like 'if any value equals value", like in former version(s)?

You mean like this?

not really.

I meant it just like on ‌'s screenshot from above

ah right, yes, I see what you mean. Yes that does still work I'm glad to say. A bit tucked away and inconsistent isn't it?

fortunatelly there is at least this possibility, even likely not intentional

We're still running on SharePoint2010, so it might no longer be correct what I'm saying. It helps to remember that the first possible date is January 1, 1900 (needs to be confirmed). Whenever a date already had any content, you can't clear it that easily. So what I would do is I'd clear the date (that would actually change the date to 1/1/1900 - as i said i'm not 100% sure its that exact date).

So when I check whether a date is empty, I check for emptiness AND being smaller than.... 1984 (my dob)

this is awesome!  I didn't know you could do this!