Working with times and dates

Time and date formats may vary depending on your data source and locale. The formats of date and time are specific to each flow and are set in the flow properties.

The following examples are commonly used functions for working with date/time fields.

Calculating time passed

You can easily calculate the time passed from a baseline date using a family of functions similar to the following one. This function returns the time in months from the baseline date to the date represented by the date string DATE as a real number. This is an approximate figure, based on a month of 30.0 days.

date_in_months(Date)

Comparing date/time values

Values of date/time fields can be compared across records using functions similar to the following one. This function returns a value of true if the date string DATE1 represents a date prior to that represented by the date string DATE2. Otherwise, this function returns a value of 0.

date_before(Date1, Date2)

Calculating differences

You can also calculate the difference between two times and two dates using functions, such as:

date_weeks_difference(Date1, Date2) 

This function returns the time in weeks from the date represented by the date string DATE1 to the date represented by the date string DATE2 as a real number. This is based on a week of 7.0 days. If DATE2 is prior to DATE1, this function returns a negative number.

Today's date

The current date can be added to the data set using the function @TODAY. Today's date is added as a string to the specified field or new field using the date format selected in the stream properties dialog box. See Date and time functions for more information.