Birthday celebrants count?

[shu.teopengco]

What’s the most efficient way to get today’s birthday celebrants from a list of more than 100,000?

[mikeloc]

Hi there, @shu.teopengco… until I saw that it wasn’t performant, I would probably go the “straightest” route with a search on the relevant data type and a constraint where the birthday is the current date (and then do a count if that’s what you are going for, but your title seems to be a bit different from your actual question). That being said, you could go the backend route and schedule a workflow to run “off hours” every day to get the list of celebrants for that day.

Maybe there is an exact right way to do it from an efficiency perspective, and maybe someone can clue us both in there… but I’m thinking you just have to experiment and see what works best for you because there could be other factors at play that aren’t evident to folks who don’t know exactly what your app does.

Oh, here is one thing I do know for sure, though… don’t get the list by doing an advanced filter on a search… that is likely the least efficient way.

Hope this helps.

Best…
Mike

[shu.teopengco]

@mikeloc

Hi there, @shu.teopengco… until I saw that it wasn’t performant, I would probably go the “straightest” route with a search on the relevant data type and a constraint where the birthday is the current date (and then do a count if that’s what you are going for, but your title seems to be a bit different from your actual question). That being said, you could go the backend route and schedule a workflow to run “off hours” every day to get the list of celebrants for that day.

Hi there. Can you suggest a constraint in searches to find today’s birthday celebrant given their birthdays? Can’t think of a constraint that can do that in the search function as of the moment.

[mikeloc]

Well, first, for some context on date comparison’s from someone who knows a heck of a lot more about it than I do, check out this post…

Constrain a list of items created today

As I’ve explained numerous times (in context, so these replies are admittedly hard-to-find), two dates (which are moments in time) happen on the same “day” (SORT OF) if a non-ambiguous text-wise comparison of the two dates (dropping time) is the same. For example: date_1:formatted as text (format MM/DD/YYYY for example) is date_2:formatted as text (again formatted as MM/DD/YYYY) … will be true if these dates happened on the same day… in whatever timezone the formatting happens in. It is this …

Given that context, I might store the birthdate as both a date and text, and then your search constraint could be something like…

Hope this helps.

Best…
Mike

[shu.teopengco]

I think that will still not work. Considering the following:

User1 Birthday: 02/05/1990
Current Date: 02/05/2021

Using the constraint “Birthday = Current date formatted as 02/05/2021” will not get the User1 birthday because of the difference in the year.

As of the moment, my last resort is using advanced filter “Current Date = Birthday change year to current year”. But this one consumes a lot of performance on the client side when dealing with large amount of birthdays to look for.

[mikeloc]

Ug, sorry about that… you’re absolutely right, of course… my brain just ain’t workin’ right today.

I can think of another way that doesn’t involve an advanced filter… you could save the birth month and date to separate fields, and then you could use two constraints on the search, one that extracts the month from the current date/time and compares it to the birth month and one that extracts the date from the current date/time and compares it to the birth date.

Again, sorry for wasting your time with that last response (although, the date comparison stuff is definitely worth a read). At the very least, we keep popping this thread to the top of the stack so that maybe someone else might come along and be like, “Why in the hell don’t you just do it like this?!?”

Best…
Mike

[shu.teopengco]

Thanks bro. I’ll check that and maybe I can consider your solution.

I hope, someone jumps in and provide a better and more efficient solution.

[mikeloc]

For what it’s worth, I found this thread that might be of interest to you…

Set date as 10/16 (without year)

Hi everyone! I’ve been looking without success for a solution to what seems like a really simple problem. Let’s say I want to send an email to a user on their birthday. The user’s birthday is stored using a simple date input field (as true date/number, not formatted as a text). I want to send an email every year, on the user’s birthday. For example: if a user’s birthday is 10/12/88, I want to send an email on 10/12 every year. When I try and use a recurring event, and go to select the date i…

The “extract” route that I mentioned is brought up in that thread, too, and this particular response is why I suggested saving the month and date to separate fields…

Set date as 10/16 (without year)

Thank you!! Just tested this, and it worked for conditional formating. I had been playing with :extract for a while, but didn’t understand putting the date and month back to back as you suggested. However, it doesn’t appear to work this way in workflows. For example, if I try to set a recurring event, it asks for the date to begin it on. I can’t find a way of inputting the equivalent of 10/16 that it will “accept”, and I can’t seem to use :extract to make it work either.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me in this thread for sure.

Best…
Mike