Different apps talk about date and time values in different ways. American, European, International—there are so many date formats, that it's a challenge to transfer date-time values across apps automatically. Some apps may not accept other date formats, while others may misinterpret the value. For example, if an app receives an input value as 04-03-2020, it may understand it as 4 March 2020, or 3 April 2020, depending on its configuration. 

Notations and formats

Basic notations

Common date and time formats

Important points to note 

1. UTC, GMT, etc. are ways of tracking time. For all practical scenarios, UTC and GMT will be the same.
   
2. ISO 8601, RFC 1123, etc. are date-time formats. ISO 8601 is the accepted format in all the modern applications.
   
3. The character T in the middle separates the year-month-day part from the hour-minute-second part. It should be parsed from the date-time value that you want in your applications. Use single quotes to parse it from the input value. For example, "yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss" should be given as the output format and not "yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss".
   
4. Use single quotes(' ') to parse any set of characters from a string that is given inside double quotes (" ").
   
5. The character 'Z' at the end of a date-time format means the date-time is UTC. That is, an offset-from-UTC of zero hours-minutes-seconds.
   
6. Instead of 'Z', if you see '+01:00', it means the timezone is one hour ahead of UTC at the moment, as noted by '+01:00'
   

Identify date formats in flows

When apps send data through APIs, they always use a specific format. You can look at the app's API documentation to identify the date format it uses. Some apps use different formats for different entities. Make sure you refer to the date format in the right section of the documentation.

Another way to find the date format is by looking at the data coming in to your flow. When you test the trigger, the output will contain the date value.

When you configure actions, we try to display the accepted date format as much as possible.

Consider a flow that creates a project in Zoho Projects when a deal is created in Zoho CRM. When we look at the data CRM sends for a new deal, we see that the date is in yyyy-MM-dd format.

While configuring the action in Zoho Projects, we see that it accepts only MM-dd-yyyy format.

Because of this inconsistency, we can't map the date values directly from CRM to Projects. Now that we've identified what we need to work with, let's look at how to convert the date value.

Convert date formats

To convert date from CRM to Project's format, we use a custom function between the trigger and action.

Use this code to create your custom function:

In our flow, we'll use the custom function between the trigger and the action. We need to map two date values: start and end date. So we use the custom function twice and map the output of the functions to the respective fields in Zoho Projects.

You can also include the date format in the custom function code, if you're going to use the function for a specific case.

This function converts any date format to the standard format of yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss, then to the specified format (MM-dd-yyyy in this case). If you choose to use this kind of function, you need to write a different function for each output date format.

Add or subtract date-time values

When you work across countries, you need to make sure your flows work with varying time zones. Custom functions help convey these date-time values across time zones accurately.

You can also use custom functions to add or subtract date-time values and set reminders. To understand how to do this, let's build a flow to notify your team on Zoho Cliq a day before a meeting scheduled in your Google Calendar.

We'll use this custom function to calculate the day before the event:

The date of the meeting is the input of this custom function. This function then calculates the date before the day of the meeting.

Now we add a delay that stalls the flow until the date provided by the custom function. The flow then sends a reminder to the team.

Depending on your requirements, you can modify these functions or write your own. Refer to the Deluge help page to learn more about functions you can use.

If you'd like to talk with us about date and time formats, shoot us an email at support@zohoflow.com.