Datetime value formatting

Product Suggestions
1

Hello,

Is it possible to include options for datetime value formatting (table / variables)? Datetime formats are cumbersome and difficult to read in some cases. Often users don’t want to see the timezone or the hours/minutes of the selected date and are only interested in seeing the day, month, year. Can this configurability be added on the app editor level (similar to the recent updates created for numbers/decimals)?

2

Hi @kkl thanks for the suggestion. We are currently looking into giving more customization for our variable value formatting in Apps, Datetime included.

As a workaround for now, you can resize the Datetime variable to only display the date in the App Editor. This would make it so the operator doesn’t see the time and timezone if that’s not necessary.

Hope this helps for now until we improve it!

3

Do you mean the column width with that suggestion?

4

Hey @kkl, another workaround we have used with some success is to add a trigger to store the datetime variable into a text variable using an expression and the DATETIMETOTEXT() function.

DATETIMETOTEXT() details on the Knowledgebase

And links to relevant formatting codes because it appears the relevant links have been removed from the Knowledgebase (as of 2 Oct 2024):

And the timezone link from the Knowledgebase article for convenience:

5

Unfortunately that works only on single values and not on Interactive Table columns or so…

1 Like
6

I suppose my suggestion does not work well for showing datetime in a table, only for a variable value (text).

7

Hi @shep @Alinator thanks for the suggestions. My coworkers and I have definitely performed those work arounds and are aware of them. Really hoping to not have this workaround and have a direct route to formatting the datetimes as desired.

Best,
Kevin

3 Likes
8

@kkl understood. We will see what we can do!

1 Like
9

Any updates?

I want this feature of letting App developers to specify the datetime format for each column of the interactive table.

We have some users using Tulip Player on their smartphones.
For some interactive table, what they only need to see in their daily use case is just “month” and “day” of the date. We do not want to take valuable space of smartphone screen with the “year” and the “time”.
However, we do need to have the “year” inside the record, for other use cases.

We do not want to use multiple fields (year/month+day) since it may easily lead to inconsistency if we do not carefully implement the triggers.

10

Thank you @ta-aoki for upvoting this suggestion.

Better native DateTime formatting including for columns on interactive tables and on specific display devices is on our radar, but isn’t yet on our near-term roadmap. We’re keeping an eye on Community upvotes.

Flagging this also to your CSM for Customer prioritization @DanielT

1 Like