How do I get this attribute customization working? Setting a state date / time in a Work Item

Nigel,

I would also be interested in if you got it working.

This is what I have discovered so far.

1. You can get the state of a work item, but you can not (trivially) detect a state change. The only chance is the way you did it: setting the value of the attribute to some value that you can detect as unassigned.
2.  For date/timestamp look at the special instructions in https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/AttributeCustomization#Using_scripts_for_attribute_cust

Hi, Nigel. I've spent a fair amount of time working with/on your script. I've toyed with dates in scripts before without much success, so I figured I'd help us both out. ;-)

A few notes, first: Date.now() returns a number of seconds, not a Date object so that won't ultimately work. There is a section in the article Ralph posted that talks about date handling -- need to use real Date objects and dojo's date.stamp.toISOString() to return a date RTC will be happy with. Because the script may execute at other times (not just on status changes) I think you missed the case where you want to return the current value so that nothing changes. Since State changes can't be trapped on the client side, you'll need a fair amount of logging during the debugging phases (which you'll probably want to remove later).

Hope this helps. It is not warranted to be bug-free, so use at your own risk:

dojo.provide("defect.calculated.verifyDateTime"); 
dojo.require("com.ibm.team.workitem.api.common.WorkItemAttributes"); 
dojo.require("dojo.date");
dojo.require("dojo.date.stamp"); 

(function() { 

var WorkItemAttributes = com.ibm.team.workitem.api.common.WorkItemAttributes; 

  dojo.declare("defect.calculated.verifyDateTime", null, { 

    getValue: function(attribute, workItem, configuration) { 

      console.log("Considering appropriate value for verifyDate...");
      var returnDate = null; 
      var verifyState = "5";
      var verifyDateTime2 = workItem.getValue(attribute); 
      var currentState = workItem.getValue(WorkItemAttributes.STATE); 

      console.log("State is " + currentState + ". Current date is set to " + verifyDateTime2);

      if (currentState == verifyState && verifyDateTime2 == null) {
        var rightNow = new Date();
        console.log("Newly in or returning to verify state, setting date to now");
        returnDate = dojo.date.stamp.toISOString(rightNow, {milliseconds:true, zulu:true});
      } else if (currentState == verifyState && verifyDateTime2 != null) {
        console.log("Already in verified state with date, setting to current value");
        returnDate = verifyDateTime2;
      } else if (currentState != verifyState && verifyDateTime2 != null) { 
        console.log("No longer in verified state, clearing verifyDate value");
        returnDate = null;
      } else {
       console.log("Nothing we care about is going on, leaving value as null");
      }

      console.log("Actually returning " + returnDate);
      return returnDate; 
    } 
  }); 
})();

When using the script and catching the transition, the last log message shows:

!ENTRY com.ibm.team.rtc.common.scriptengine 1 0 2012-11-08 16:35:45.389

!MESSAGE LOG: Actually returning 2012-11-09T00:35:45.387Z

If you see this, you should be okay. If you are not seeing successful saves, check your server log for NumberFormatException errors meaning you are not quite handling the date data correctly.