Time is a very import function in programming. Its used a lot in databases records.
At first I could not find any way of producing these until I stumbled upon DEVICE and the block seconds since 1970 i.e. Unix time - perfect.
However, I’ve not yet found a way to convert these timestamps back to a human readable form.
Does anyone know if there is a way (I’d rather not call an external API)
Thought I would enquire before I make a request for enhancement
If you look at the blocks from this category, you will see that there are other blocks for working with dates and time.
Like @actech stated there are blocks to grab current
Month, day of month, day of week, hour, minute, second, and year
Thanks, actech and jgibb20189
I can use these to create a timestamp in human readable form and in my current app will use as there appears to be no other option.
I’m from the old school and storing a character string like that is bad practice. A unix time, as given in the “time since 1970”, is a much better solution. Firstly its a much smaller entity to store and as its often already native and therefore faster for the cpu to process. What’s more its easier to sort records with a number.
Ugly as it is, I’m going to store both the human readable string and the Unix time. That way I can sort on the unix time and not have to write a very ugly procedure to be able sort on the character string.
I believe this product would benefit from much better time handling which should not be a difficult X platform process.
Hold the press!
The above I put together (sure it might be further refined) to produce a 8 character string which can be sorted upon. It could be further enhanced to include hour and second. Its easy to carve up back into a more normal date representation.
Note the Join is need to convert the numeric to a text string
If you need fast and reliable operation of Thunkable X, do not use app-variable blocks.
would you suggesting using the “stored” or “cloud” variable instead?
I suggest using variables from the function parameter and components that can be used to transfer data between screens (if necessary)
