Deluge Tips & Tricks: Mastering dates and times

Deluge Tips & Tricks: Mastering dates and times

Hello everyone!

We're bringing back our Deluge Tips & Tricks series, where we show you how to make the most of Deluge for achieving a wide range of use cases.

Working with dates and times is a fundamental part of almost any business application. Whether you're timestamping entries, scheduling tasks, or sending notifications, knowing how to manipulate date and time values in Deluge is a crucial skill.
 
Deluge provides simple yet powerful functions to help you fetch the current time, reformat values, and perform time zone conversions. This post highlights how Deluge can become your go-to for handling many different use cases.
 
Zoho variables 
Let's begin with the basics. Zoho variables are special predefined variables in Deluge that can be used across different Zoho services. Currently, Deluge offers two such variables related to dates and times: zoho.currentdate and zoho.currenttime. These return the current date, and the current date and time respectively, based on the format you've configured in the settings of the respective Zoho service. For more information, visit the Zoho Variables help doc.

While the aforementioned Zoho variables are your go-to for fetching the current date and time, their default format is primarily useful for basic logging. But, in many scenarios, you may need to display this information in a different format or even convert it to another time zone. Fortunately, Deluge has you covered. Let's take a look at how:

Customizing date and time formats   

Converting date formats
Different users often prefer different date formats when entering data, and Deluge makes it easy to handle these variations. For example, if you have a date stored as a string and need to convert it into a date variable, either to perform calculations or reformat it, you can use the toDate() and toString() built-in functions.

Here's a sample script which converts date from the dd/mm/yyyy format to the dd-mm-yyyy:
// Convert a string to a date variable
dateAsString = "03/12/2024 03:15:35";
dateObject = totime(dateAsString, "dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm:ss");
info dateObject;
// Convert the date object back to a string in a new format
info dateObject.toString("dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm:ss");

 

Converting time formats (24 hours to 12 hours)

You may sometimes need to switch between a 24-hour format and a 12-hour format when using zoho.currenttime. Thankfully, Deluge makes this simple. Here’s how you can do it:

currentTime = zoho.currenttime;
info currentTime.toString("dd-MM-YYYY hh:mm:ss a"); 
// Example output: 25-09-2025 11:11:11 AM

Handling time zone conversions  

In today's globalized world, your customers may be spread across different time zones, and to add to the complexity, large countries like the USA or Russia have multiple time zones even within their own borders. This can easily lead to head scratching scenarios when working with time-based data. Fortunately, Deluge has got your back here too.

The trick is to first convert the date-time string into a unixEpoch timestamp and then use toDateTimeString() to display it in the target time zone.

Converting your account's time to a user's time zone 

The zoho.currenttime variable returns the time based on the setting you've chosen. Let's assume that your account is set for IST (Indian Standard Time) and you want to display it for a user in Los Angeles. Here's how to do it:

// zoho.currenttime returns an IST time
datetimeString = "21-Aug-2025 15:50:13"; 
 
// Convert the string to a Unix timestamp
unixValue = datetimeString.unixEpoch();  
// Convert the Unix timestamp to a datetime string in the target timezone
info toDateTimeString(unixValue, "dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss", "America/Los_Angeles");
// Output: 21-Aug-2025 03:20:13
 

 

Converting between two specific time zones 

What's more, the same approach can also be applied to convert between two time zones. You can specify the source time zone during the Unix conversion to do this. This is particularly useful when your input string is from a known time zone that isn't your server's default.

 

The below script demonstrates time conversion from IST to Sydney time:

// Specify the source timezone (IST) when converting to Unix epoch
unixValue = "25-Aug-2025 14:28:53".unixEpoch("IST");
 
// Convert to the target timezone (Australia/Sydney)
info toDateTimeString(unixValue,"dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm:ss","Australia/Sydney");
// Output: 25-Aug-2025 18:58:53

 

You can learn more about toTime and toDateTimeString functions at these help links.

 

We hope these tips help you handle date and time operations in your Deluge scripts more effectively—they can be used across all Zoho services that support Deluge.

 

Deluge is a vast and powerful language and we aim to help you master it to make your life easier. We'll be back with more tips and tricks soon, so stay tuned!

 

And if you have any questions or other cool tricks, please share them below!

 

Until next time,

The Deluge Team