How SWOOP Handles Date Ranges

All Ranges are in Whole Days

To avoid complexity, SWOOP does not support selection of fractions of a day.

Date Ranges are Inclusive

For example: from 14 June 2023 to 14 June 2023 is one whole day, containing 24 hours. NOTE: when selecting a single day in the SWOOP calendar control, click the same day twice and then click the Done button to close the calendar.

Another example: from 16 May 2023 to 14 June 2023 is a 30 day period.

Short Standard Ranges

These are simple:

• Yesterday - this is the most recent day that has been fully collected.
• Last 7 days - from 6 days back, until today, inclusive.
• Last 30 days - from 29 days back, until today, inclusive.

NOTE: the data miner can be delayed, and processing takes some time. Therefore "today" is necessarily always only partly collected, but for large sites it might even be a day behind. The most recent data is seen at the bottom of the page  Therefore "today" and "yesterday" will be from the perspective of which data has been collected. The last 7 days and last 30 days will not include all the data.

These short ranges will always include a fixed number of days. However the longer ranges (based on months) do not guarantee a specific number of days. This is covered in the next section.

Long Standard Ranges

These are measured in months, but do not necessarily land exactly on a whole month boundary. They always finish on the latest day in the system (i.e. "today") therefore contain the latest data, even though the final day will be incomplete. Stepping backwards will try to align with the same day from earlier months. In those situations where current month is a long month and the date range might start on a day that doesn't really exist, it will simply find the end day of that month and then step one day forward. See examples below.

• Last 3 months - go back to the same day of the month, 3 months ago. See examples.
• Last 6 months - go back to the same day of the month, 6 months ago. See examples.
• Last 12 months - go back a whole year.

Examples.

Special Range: Year to Date

This is always setting the start date to the first day of the current year. The number of days in this range can be any count up to a full year.

Timezone Options

Standard behaviour in SWOOP is to use the local timezone from the web browser. The browser provides an offset in minutes, and all the SWOOP results are adjusted by that. However, this can lead to confusingly inconsistent results for large companies that might have users spanning multiple timezones around the world. Because SWOOP will keep a cache of previous results, the calculation is more efficient when all users are set to the same timezone. If this is useful, the setting a locked timezone is an available option, please contact support and make a request.

See also the Javascript timezone offset.  (contains technical jargon).

Daylight Savings

Web browsers usually shift in and out of Daylight Savings based on local settings, however because timezones are quite complex, the exact day of the shift can be inconsistent from year to year and nearby locations might actually end up using different decisions on Daylight Savings for political reasons.

SWOOP keeps things simple by insisting that all days, in any particular calculation, are shifted by the same number of minutes. Therefore it does not include any special adjustment when the starting date is inside Daylight Savings and the final date is outside Daylight Savings or vice versa.

When the timezone is locked to a specific value, this will not shift with Daylight Savings and will remain a constant number of minutes.