Date Validation – Comparing Dates in Liquid

In this quick tip, we’ll see how to check whether a given date is earlier than today’s date (or another specific date). I’ll compare a date column from Dataverse to today’s date but this method could just as easily be used to compare 2 date columns from Dataverse.

This is something I found a little tricky when I was getting started with liquid. I expected there would be a datediff function but no, so how do we work around this?

{% if date_to_check <= expiry_validation_date %}
    {{ date_to_check }}
{% else %}
    <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-alert" aria-hidden="true"></span> {{ date_to_check }}
{% endif %}

Read on if you’re interested in how I arrived at this code…

Please note that this simplified approach is suitable for comparing dates only (times won’t be considered as they’d produce a number too big for liquid to handle)

Transforming values

In liquid, we can use filters to transform values into various different formats (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/portals/liquid/liquid-filters#date-filters for the available options).
So, how do we filter? Just type a pipe character | after the value, followed by the name of the filter – in our example, that’s date.
If the filter accepts any parameters, we type a colon and then pass the parameters, like so:
{{ now | date: 'yyyyMMdd' }}

(As you can see, getting the current date and time is nice and easy. We use the now keyword.)

Assign the date to a variable for easy reuse

We’ve got a decent starting point BUT we can’t really ‘do’ anything with the result yet other than output on the page. Let’s fix that by assigning it to a variable…
{% assign current_date = now | date: 'yyyyMMdd' | integer %}
With our filters (transformations), current_date now reads something like so: 20230306

In my example, I want to check the Expiry Date column from my Royalty Agreements table in Dataverse. I’ll give that the same treatment; assign to a variable and transform:
{% assign date_to_check = result.musdyn_expirydate | date: 'yyyyMMdd' | integer %}

Now to compare them…

We can then compare with simple operators like:

So let’s see how to check whether a date is in the past
{% if date_to_check < current_date %}

Taking this a step further… what if we want to check a date is within a certain period?

Example: is expiry date within the next 30 days?

We’ll start with today’s date and add 30 days. For this we have the very handy date_add_days filter

{% expiry_validation_date = now | date_add_days: 30 %}
{% expiry_validation_date = now | expiry_validation_date | date: 'yyyyMMdd' | integer %}


…and then compare using if
{% if date_to_check >= expiry_validation_date %}

In this example, I’ll output a warning icon for expiry dates falling within the next 30 days:

{% if date_to_check <= expiry_validation_date %}
    {{ date_to_check }}
{% else %}
    <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-alert" aria-hidden="true"></span> {{ date_to_check }}
{% endif %}