I was doing an Alteryx challenge where you make an App to find how many years, months, weeks, days and hours difference there is between the present and a chosen date. At first I used a Text Box tool as shown:
However, it seemed a bit more fitting to use the Date interface tool. I streamlined the workflow a bit by removing the datetime parse tools and instead changing the formulas to use 'ToDate' functions instead which automatically change the values to dates. I removed the Text box tool and inputted the Date tool like so:
However I ran into a problem. The dates in the text inputs were formatted as DD-MM-YYYY which the 'ToDate' function cannot read as a date, which is why I had the DateTime parse tool before. However, I quickly fixed this by changing the text inputs to a YYYY-MM-DD format instead which worked out fine.
The configuration window of the Date interface tool doesn't consist of anything but the name for the question. The only thing I'd advise is to make sure it is connected to a date type value through an action or at least a string that is in the YYYY-MM-DD format.
The User Interface for the Date interface tool is actually quite nice and refreshing from the usual Alteryx stuff:
This blog was mainly about something different that I had used and learnt today. The challenge workflow is actually Altery Challenge 225: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Weekly-Challenge/Challenge-225-How-Long-Has-It-Been/td-p/606415