Overview
Date effectivity preserves a history of changes made to the attributes of some objects. As a Professional user, you can retrieve and edit past and future versions of an object.
Many Human Capital Management (HCM) objects, including person names, assignments, benefits plans, grades, jobs, locations, payrolls, and positions are date-effective.
Logical and Physical Records
Date-effective objects include one or more physical records. Each record has effective start and end dates. One record is current and available to transactions. Others are past or take effect in the future. Together, these records constitute the logical record or object instance. For a date-effective logical row, which is a collection on contiguous temporal physical rows, each physical row CreatedBy (CREATED_BY) and CreationDate (CREATION_DATE) are the same.
This table shows changes to the department manager attribute in a department business object. Each row represents a single physical record.
|
Physical Record |
Effective Start Date |
Effective End Date |
Department Manager |
|---|---|---|---|
|
4 |
18 January, 2022 |
C. Woods |
|
|
3 |
15 October, 2021 |
17 January, 2022 |
A. Chan |
|
2 |
13 June, 2020 |
14 October, 2021 |
T. Romero |
|
1 |
22 March, 2019 |
12 June, 2020 |
G. Martin |
Effective End Dates in Physical Records
Every physical record except the last has an effective end date. The update process adds this date, which is the day before the effective start date of the next record, whenever you update the object.
Object End Dates
You can enter a final effective end date for some date-effective objects. For example, terminating an assignment adds a final effective end date to the assignment. Alternatively, the End Date action may be available. If you end date a date-effective object, then it isn't available to transactions after that date. But the object's history is retrievable.
Status Values in Date-Effective Objects
Some date-effective objects, such as grades and jobs, have both effective dates and status values. When the object status is Inactive, the object isn't available to transactions, regardless of its effective dates. Setting the status to Inactive makes objects unavailable to transactions. If you can't enter an effective end date for an object, then changing its status has the same effect.
Future-Dated Changes
For date-effective objects, you can enter future changes. For example, you enter the worker promotion shown in this table on 25 July, 2022 to take effect on 18 October, 2022.
|
Physical Record |
Effective Start Date |
Effective End Date |
Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
|
2 |
18 October, 2022 |
IC2 |
|
|
1 |
14 December, 2020 |
17 October, 2022 |
IC1 |
Physical record two becomes current on 18 October, 2022. From 14 December, 2020 until 17 October, 2022 physical record one is current and available to transactions. If you can access the object history, you can see physical record two before it takes effect.
When future-dated changes exist, other actions may be limited. For example, to end this worker's assignment before the promotion takes effect, you must first delete the promotion.
Date-Enabled Objects
Some objects, such as work relationships, are date-enabled rather than date-effective. They have start and end dates that define when they're available, but they have no history of changes. New attribute values overwrite existing attribute values.