system date token "invalid" in flow

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to use the system date token in a Change Data Value flow.  The marketing campaign is triggered by the open of an email. We'd like Marketo to record the date in which the person FIRST opened ANY email.  We use the field "Opt In Date" to measure this. 

Smart list Trigger: Opened email = Any

Flow Change data value:  If "Opt in date = empty"  "Opt in date = {{system.date}}"


I have this set up already in an activated marketing campaign and this rule keeps getting ignored because the token is invalid. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Rebecca,
I would add the filter (opt in date empty) to the Smart List and in the Flow just set the field value to {{system.date}}

Best regards

Steffen

[Anonymous]

I'll try that and see if it works. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Anonymous]

Hi Rebecca,

Steffen's suggestion is a good one to ensure that only empty fields get written to. There is another way, it's to block field updates to that specific field in field management under the Admin section. This will ensure that the field only get's written to a single time when it's empty, any future update will be ignored.

I think your issue is not this exactly though. It sounds like you have a problem with the change data value and the token. regardless of if the field is empty or not.

Do you know what the field type for "opt in date" is? If it's a date field type and you select it in the change data flow action, you should notice the value area turns into a callander picker. You can't use tokens there.

Try doing this with a string field type and it should work. Let me know if this helps!

[Jep_Castelein2]

I'm fairly sure you can use tokens in Date and Datetime fields, however, they need to match type. So for Date fields you can use only {{system.date}} and for Datetime fields you can only use {{system.datetime}}. 

[Anonymous]

Jep,

I stand corrected! Thank you for noticing. So the issue I ran into is that when you have a date type field, the change data value flow step itself turns into a date picker, you will notice if you start tying the token that it will not pre-populate.



I ran into this and assumed the rest would not work. If you manually type {{system.date}} and keep moving forward it does actually work, I tested this to confirm.

Having said this, Rebecca, you should probably open a support ticket to find out why it is not working for you. On my end, I will ensure to speak with Product Management on enhancing the flow action UI to auto suggest token names that apply to the field type.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for the responses. We think it might be an issue with the tokens not matching the fields so we are going to try {{system.datetime}}

[Anonymous]

Rebecca,

You can find out what the field type is exactly by going to the Admin section of marketo, click on Field Management, then select the field in question to see it's Type:



Note that this does require admin rights.