Dates & Time in a Knack Database
Updated: Sep 24, 2022
Questions about your Knack app? Let's Chat. https://www.knackbuilders.com​. Here I discuss several topics on managing dates and time in your Knack database app. General settings, field creation, date equations, special functions, and something called, "unix time".
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Full Transcript
hello it's dave parrish here
with neck builders uh doing another
um
video series today's topic
is dates and time
in knack i'm going to go over some some
basics this won't be too long and some
other
uh it's sort of a can be a big topic i'm
going to do some broad jokes here but
there's a few interesting things you can
do to manage dates and time within your
nat gap uh i'll be back in just a moment
to go through that thank you
[Music]
okay
here i go dates and time
and knack now first something really
basic
um if you go up to your
uh
the settings of your app
you're gonna have some options here to
set the correct time zone and daylight
savings also that well any action that
happens it's time stamped will then
be in that time zone
but let me get into some other stuff
i just took a
any app here this is one of their
um
template apps but i'm not gonna add some
date fields here i already added two day
one day two
these are pretty simple i mean it's
going to give you your format
and if you want it to be
captured when a record's created
time stamp it then or not or you can set
it to a specific date and if you want to
have time or not those are
straightforward i'm sure everyone knows
that now let's do something else here
um
i'm gonna look at these records
i'm gonna
get rid of this one real quick
do something with these let's make an
equation
let me get this out of here
um
submit that
okay
let's do an equation that deals with
dates
[Music]
you're going to go to equation
and let's just make this uh equation
uh date
2 minus
d1
and
we're dealing we're looking at dates so
we want to say it's in the date equation
and then it will can ask you what do you
want it to result in the difference
between the two by hours by days by
weeks let's do days
it doesn't do months months are a little
weird
because they can be different
and we want this to result it can result
in a date but usually you're going to
want a number so this could be a use
case could be hey i want to know
how i invoice how late it is
or i want a
five days before an invoice is due i
want to create a task
that sends out a reminder something like
that well that's where you can use it
but let's just make this quick you're
gonna go to fields
let's do date one
or day two minus
date
one
okay there it is
and you have other options here but
we're going to sleep with default
and let's go here
let's put some values in here
let's make this it doesn't really matter
what they are i want to make this
today the fifth
and i want to make this
uh
some the day before the fourth
okay pretty simple
uh
the fifth is one day later than the
fourth so it results in number one
the number we want now that's all easy
and you guys can deal with that but let
me talk about something else
when i first saw what i'm going to show
you i'm like what the hell is that
let's do this let's
make this blank
so we don't have a value there
and it gives us this number nineteen
thousand
one hundred and seventy eight i'm like
what is that and that can show up a lot
there's lots of times you're not gonna
have
like a you've completed date you know
completed date when the record's created
isn't there yet because you haven't
completed it
and you're going to get this number here
because sometimes it could be a negative
dependent on your orientation or your
calculation
here's what this
is and i i don't know that you can
actually use it but it's something
called unix time
um
and what it specifically is
is january 1st
1907
some computer person or group came up
with this thing i don't know what it
does or why it's 1970 maybe that's when
computers
sort of
were taking over i don't know but that's
what it is and what this is
19
178 are the number of days since january
1st
1970
and i'm just going to check that let's
make this thing
one
oh one
1970.
submit it
now it's a zero because it's it defaults
this to be
uh when it's blank to you next time uh
1970 january 1st and so now i'm
subtracting that date from itself and
that results in a zero
um
that's just useful but let's let's do
something else here let me put some go
back to our other dates
um oh one
oh
i know oh seven
oh five
2022
so that's today
and i'm gonna make
this um
now let me show you something else and
now it's one day apart
let me this can be useful too um
there's a lot of times that you might
want to know the day a date represents
is it friday tuesday
um
and you can do something here too
watch this another equation
and i'm gonna say i'm gonna call this
day of
date
two
which is today
and
here's what i'm gonna do right here i'm
gonna go get functions i can just start
typing in this is going to be useful for
a lot of stuff
get
there's all these pre-made functions
get day of month
get day of week get last a month get
month get what you get it
so
if you have a date and you want to
extract something from this let's do it
let's call it
get day a week
and i'm gonna do i'm gonna go
for the day two
so i just made a formula
going to tell me what day a week is
now i'm going to go over here
now if you know anything about knack and
when you create a formula like that or
some other function
it takes a little bit for it to catch up
with itself after you first made it
um
there's tricks you can do i'm gonna i'm
gonna just
do an update
on this record i'm gonna set
his i'm just changing this
and
well hold on here
update
i'm going to update bedrooms i'm forcing
it to do something with the record when
it when you force it to do something
that engages that this should result in
it
doing it okay so now it is
um it gave us the value three it gives
you the number one two three four
through seven
um
and just so you know when they're
handling dates
in here
sunday is one so today's tuesday sunday
is one monday two
tuesday three so dates start on sunday i
think you can change that
if you're using a calendar view but this
is how it's going to handle that so we
now know
what day of the week it is 3 represents
tuesday and if you had to display that
someplace
you might want to make a conditional
field that has the days of the week
monday tuesday
et cetera listed
and then put conditions on it if date is
three make tuesday
if you know do that that can be useful
too
um
that's pretty much what i have those are
some interesting things about dates
within that
and again you can do all kinds of
complicated stuff i may have another
video on some advanced things with dates
but this gives you a general overview of
what's up appreciate it folks thanks