Formatting Timestamps

In web and mobile app development, handling date and time formats is a common task. Xano simplifies this process by providing a powerful set of filters and options to format timestamps according to your needs. In this guide, we'll explore how to leverage Xano's date and time formatting capabilities, making it easy for you to display dates and times in a user-friendly and readable manner.

Understanding Timestamp Storage in Xano

Xano stores timestamps as Unix timestamps in milliseconds, which are essentially large numbers representing the time elapsed since January 1st, 1970. For example, a typical timestamp might look like this: `1684421400000`.

While these numbers are precise representations of time, they're not very human-readable. Fortunately, Xano allows you to format these timestamps into a variety of formats, making it easy to display dates and times in a way that's meaningful to your users.

Accessing the Date and Time Formatting Options

Xano's documentation provides a comprehensive section on date and time formatting, including a link to the official PHP documentation on date and time formatting characters. This link is invaluable as it lists all the available characters and their corresponding descriptions, along with example return values.

To access this information, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Xano documentation and navigate to the "Date and Time" section.
2. Scroll down to the "What are my options for formatting date and time?" section.
3. Click on the provided link to the PHP documentation.

Here, you'll find a table with all the formatting characters, their descriptions, and example outputs. This table will serve as your reference guide for creating custom date and time formats.

Formatting Timestamps with Xano

Xano provides a `format_timestamp` filter that allows you to apply custom formatting to your timestamps. This filter accepts two parameters:

1. `format`: This is where you specify the desired date and time format using the characters from the PHP documentation.
2. `timezone` (optional): If needed, you can specify a timezone here. Xano's documentation also provides a list of supported timezones.

Here's an example of how to use the `format_timestamp` filter:

In this example, the `format_timestamp` filter is applied to the `created_at` field, using the format string `'l, F j, Y'`. This will output the date in the format "Day of the week, Month Day, Year" (e.g., "Tuesday, May 17, 2022").

You can customize the format string to match your desired output by combining different characters from the PHP documentation. For example, to display the time along with the date, you could use the following format string:

This will output the date and time in the format "Day of the week, Month Day, Year Hour:Minute:Second AM/PM" (e.g., "Tuesday, May 17, 2022 3:45:12 PM").

Formatting Lists of Timestamps

When working with lists of records, you'll need to loop through each item and apply the `format_timestamp` filter individually. Here's an example:

In this example, we're iterating over a list of records using the `query.all_records` variable. Within the loop, we're applying the `format_timestamp` filter to the `created_at` field of each item, using the desired format string.

Conclusion

Xano's date and time formatting capabilities provide a flexible and powerful way to display timestamps in a user-friendly and readable format. By leveraging the `format_timestamp` filter and the comprehensive list of formatting characters from the PHP documentation, you can create custom date and time formats that meet your specific requirements.

Whether you're building web applications, mobile apps, or internal tools, mastering time formatting in Xano will help you deliver a polished and professional user experience. Experiment with different formatting options, and don't hesitate to consult Xano's documentation for further guidance and examples.