Okta Certified Workflows - Specialty · Part II

Update Profile Attributes

31% of Part II — dates, conditions, and verifying the result.

Task 2: Evaluate and Modify Your Dates

3 tasks · this deck covers task 2 of 3

The Task

"Evaluate and modify your dates"

Calculated dates (Task 1) only drive an attribute update once you can test them against a condition — "has this date passed?", "is this within N days?" — and branch accordingly. That's the Expression function.

The Mechanism — Expression

"Build a True or False expression by combining operators and values that you type with fields that you drag and drop in... At runtime, the expression is evaluated using the values of the fields to generate a single output of true or false."

Comparison operators: == != > >= < <=. Logical operators: and, or, not, xor. Parentheses group sub-expressions. # starts an inline comment.

Date Fields Inside an Expression

"Date fields convert to a timestamp that will work in comparisons." That's what makes it possible to write an expression like a term-end date compared against Now — both sides resolve to comparable timestamps.

The Gotcha — No Text Comparison

"Text comparisons are currently not supported inside a True/False Expression. We are working on fixing this, but for now use Compare to do text comparisons."

If a modify-dates condition also needs to check a text field (e.g., "and status equals 'Staged'"), that piece has to be evaluated with the separate Compare function — not folded into the same Expression.

The Connection — Applied Tutorial

Okta's own "Tutorial: Time-based actions" walks through exactly this pattern end to end: create a contractor user in Staged status, calculate term dates, then later activate the account on the start date and automatically suspend it after a designated time — using a table to track the dates, and helper flows to act on them.

The Angle — What Trips People Up

Watch for this in your own sandbox run:

→ Trying to compare two text fields directly inside an Expression card — swap to Compare for that piece.

→ Forgetting that a number field evaluates to false only at exactly 0, and a text field evaluates to false only when null or the literal string "false" — everything else is truthy.

One Line To Remember

Expression evaluates a True/False result from operators (==, !=, >, >=, <, <=, and/or/not/xor) and dragged-in fields — date fields auto-convert to comparable timestamps, but text comparisons need Compare instead. The Time-based Actions tutorial shows this pattern applied to a contractor onboarding/offboarding flow.

Sources: help.okta.com — Expression (type=wf&id=ext-boolean-method-expression); Tutorial: Time-based actions (type=wf&id=ext-tutorials-time-based-actions)

Next: Task 3 →