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Date Handling in AI Platform Engineering Agents

Status: 🟢 In-use (Part of consolidated date handling feature) Category: Features & Enhancements Date: October 27, 2025 (Consolidated into 2025-11-05-date-handling.md)

This guide explains how agents automatically receive current date/time context and how to properly handle date-related queries.

Testing Date-Aware Agents​

When testing agents that rely on dates:

# Mock the datetime to ensure consistent test results
from unittest.mock import patch
from datetime import datetime
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo

@patch('ai_platform_engineering.utils.a2a_common.base_langgraph_agent.datetime')
def test_date_aware_query(mock_datetime):
    # Set a fixed date for testing
    mock_datetime.now.return_value = datetime(2025, 10, 26, 15, 30, 45, tzinfo=ZoneInfo("UTC"))

    # Test your agent with relative date queries
    response = await agent.stream("show me today's incidents", session_id="test")
    # Assert expected behavior

Best Practices​

  1. Always Use Absolute Dates in API Calls: Convert "today" to "2025-10-26" before calling APIs
  2. Be Explicit About Timezones: When timezone matters, specify it in queries
  3. Use ISO 8601 Format: Most APIs prefer ISO 8601 (2025-10-26T15:30:45Z)
  4. Include Date Context in Responses: When showing results, remind users what "today" means
  5. Test Edge Cases: Test with dates at month/year boundaries, weekends, etc.
  • base_langgraph_agent.py: Contains _get_system_instruction_with_date() method that automatically injects current date/time
  • prompt_templates.py: Contains DATE_HANDLING_NOTES and include_date_handling parameter
  • mcp_tools/datetime_tool.py: Deprecated and removed - replaced by automatic injection in BaseLangGraphAgent