Support all ADF Date/Time functions for debugging

[gbrueckl]

support all functions listed here where parsing a ADF project for debugging:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/data-factory-functions-variables

[gbrueckl]

first set of functions is now supported, basically those which exist in the C# class DateTime

[m1nkeh]

excuse my ignorance.. does this mean the latest version now supports WindowStart / WindowEnd ?

[gbrueckl]

actually this issue referrs to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/v1/data-factory-functions-variables#data-factory-functions
so basically the built-in functions that you can use to modify variables (SliceStart/End, WindowStart/End) within ADF and that the LocalEnvironment can also process them into the correct value

WindowStart/WindowEnd is currently not supported. To be honest, I do not know if this was ever fully implemented in ADFv1 at all?
Whats actually the difference between WindowStart/End and SliceStart/End?
as the slices of a dataset have to match the slices of the activities and pipelines, it is actually the same - no?

[m1nkeh]

you raise a good question @gbrueckl , i have read the doco repeatedly about the differences between WindowsStart/End, and SliceStart/End and to be honest i also fail to see what they do differently..

I half wonder if it's their scope.. i.e. one for an Activity, and one for an Input/Output ?

For practically every use case I have though, they are interchangeable.. might think differently if I had more pipelines where they rolled up Days --> Weeks, or Hours --> Days and therefore needed to define different grains of Slice ??

[gbrueckl]

I think that was the original idea - having Slices split into Windows (or the other way round) to allow the combination of daily and hourly data for example. But thats just a wild guess.

For usability, I will add 2 new optional parameters for WindowStart/End where the defaults will be derived from SliceStart/End