Calculate Age in Javascript

I had a registration form in Apex which asks the applicant to enter their Date of Birth in a date item; I then needed to calculate how old they would be at the start of the event, which determines a number of rules, such as whether we need to obtain their parent’s permission.

In my first release I implemented this with a Dynamic Action which ran SQL something like this:

select round(months_between(start_date
                           ,to_date(:P1_DATE_OF_BIRTH,'DD-MON-YYYY'))
             / 12,1)
from events
where event_id = :P1_EVENT_ID;

This worked fine – it takes advantage of Oracle’s builtin support for date arithmetic. However, it was rather slow, because it needs to do a roundtrip to the database to run the query and return the result.

I wanted a pure javascript implementation to avoid the roundtrip, but my initial searches came up with a number of sub-par solutions involving extracting the year and month portions and applying simple arithmetic which did not take into account leap years.

Instead, I’ve gone with an easier solution taking advantage of the moments javascript package.

  1. Add the path to moment.min.js in the File URLs attribute of the page. You could get your own local copy or point to the relevant file from a cdn: http://cdnjs.com/libraries/moment.js/
  2. Add a function to the Function and Global Variable Declaration attribute of the page, which uses the moments object to convert the strings into date objects, and then call the diff method to get the number of years as a floating-point number, e.g.:
    function getAge() {
      var e = moment($v("P1_EVENT_DATE"),"YYYYMMDD")
         ,dob = moment($v("P1_DATE_OF_BIRTH"),"DD-MMM-YYYY");
      return e.diff(dob,'years',true).toFixed(1);
    }
  3. Add a Dynamic Action to the Date of Birth item which calls getAge() and sets the value of the Age display item.

The result is a much quicker response and less load on the database. This is an intentionally simple example, you could do it in different ways to suit your situation (e.g. if you have multiple date items you need to handle on the same page, you might pass them as parameters to the function).

The moments javascript package has an impressive list of features, including pretty-formatting a duration (e.g. a client-side version of the SINCE format e.g. “3 years ago”) documented here.