Xporter has powerful tools in handling dates and times for your reports. If you wished, you can set up a report to run every week on Monday at 7:00am and have it grab only the orders on your store over the weekend. You can create a report that gathers data from year beginning to the current date. Or you can just set up a report to handle refund timings. Date information is controlled in two different ways in a report. Through report filter drop downs and through liquid fields.
Report Filters
When you first create a report template and start putting in columns, Xporter will automatically set the date filter on the report to what it thinks best suits your data. The most common filter it will set is Order > Created at > Within Date Range. This means when you go to generate a report two boxes will pop up allowing you to enter a start and end time. Without this filter, Xporter would try to request your entire store history of orders and likely fail.
The second common filter that Xporter will set happens if you enter any data that requires refund, fulfillment, or transaction information. In this case it will add one filter Order > Updated at > After Start Date and another Order > Created at > Before End Date, and a third Refund > Created at > Within Date Range. This last filter changing based on refunds, transactions, or fulfillments. These will also cause two boxes to appear when you generate a report, but the dates function a bit differently. Generally, reports with data from refunds, fulfillments, or transactions care about orders placed at any time in your store's history but only modified within a given time period. For example, you may want to report all refunds on your store for the month of July even if the original orders were placed before July. This set of filters will allow this to work.
Automatic Generation
You may wonder how these filters work when you have reports set to automatically generate. In a manual report you see two boxes to enter a date range, but this does not occur in an automatic report. When you set up an automatic report you will enter in a report frequency and a start time. The frequency could be every 1 month, or every 2 weeks for example. The start time may be February 1, 2022 at 7:00 am.
In these cases the report will automatically fill in the date range just as you would fill in the boxes on a manual report. The end time will be set to the time your report runs at, minus 1 second. The start time will be set to when your report runs, minus the frequency you set. For example, if you have a report run every month starting on February 1 at 7:00am, then the start time will be January 1 at 7:00am and the ending time will be February 1 at 6:59:59 am.
Liquid Dates
For most cases, the dropdown options will allow your reports to run as you would expect. But sometimes, you may need a more complicated arrangement of timings for a particular report. This is where you can use liquid filters.