Formatting Dates and Times

[elemonnier]

For those that need more advanced date and time formatting and conversion methods you can use the SimpleDateFormat and TimeZone Javascript libraries to do pretty much anything you want. I needed to create some very customized e-mail templates for a change window notification.

In the following example I lookup a change ticket and pull out the start and end date. I also lookup a user to determine the user's time zone. Using the SimpleDateFormat library I can parse the Service-Now dates and then set the time zone to GMT, Service-Now's default date format. Next I create some more instances of SimpleDateFormat and TimeZone to convert the time zone and format the text how I like.

You can run this in the Background Script to tweak it until it looks right.

var gr = new GlideRecord("change_request");
gr.addQuery("sys_id","40145gvghd90004f345tgde776754");
gr.query();
while(gr.next()) {
 //Find user's time zone
  var ur = new GlideRecord("sys_user");
  ur.addQuery("user_name","jdoe");
  ur.query();
  while(ur.next()) {

    //Parse start and end date from change request in PST
    var input = new Packages.java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
    var tz1 = new Packages.java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT");
    input.setTimeZone(tz1);

    startDate = gr.start_date;
    startDate = input.parse(startDate);
    endDate = gr.end_date;
    endDate = input.parse(endDate);

    //Convert to user's time zone and print result
    var datetime = new Packages.java.text.SimpleDateFormat("EEEE, MMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm a z");
    var time = new Packages.java.text.SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm a z");
    var tz2 = new Packages.java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone(ur.time_zone);
    datetime.setTimeZone(tz2);
    time.setTimeZone(tz2);

    gs.print(datetime.format(startDate) + ' through ' + time.format(endDate));
  }
}

Source dates:
startDate: 2011-10-21 05:13:49
endDate: 2011-10-21 06:13:51

Result: Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:13 PM MDT through 12:13 AM MDT

Here are the formatting options:
3 chars will give you the abbreviated text
4 or more will return the full text

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
G	Era designator	Text	AD
y	Year	Year	1996 ;  96
M	Month in year	Month	July ;  Jul ;  07
w	Week in year	Number	27
W	Week in month	Number	2
D	Day in year	Number	189
d	Day in month	Number	10
F	Day of week in month	Number	2
E	Day in week	Text	Tuesday ;  Tue
a	Am/pm marker	Text	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
m	Minute in hour	Number	30
s	Second in minute	Number	55
S	Millisecond	Number	978
z	Time zone	General time zone	Pacific Standard Time ;  PST ;  GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	-0800

[lawrence_eng]

Thank you, elemonnier!

[qfawcett]

If you are looking for a simple way to add the timezone indicator to ALL time or date/time fields on all forms simply modify the system property: 'glide.sys.time_format' appending a 'z' to the end of the format string.

Ex:
HH:mm:ss z

Produces date formatted as:
16:43:25 CDT

[robbika]

This is an old post but I was looking at it anyway.

There is an issue with notification scripting.

If you for example have some code that prints out a bunch of variables on a record, then using getDisplayValue() doesn't append the time zone info.

And there doesn't seem to be a simple way to make it do it.

[emyrold]

Hi Eric,

Do you have any idea if this still works in Fuji?   I copy and pasted your code into scripts background.   Create a Test Change Request, updated the sys_id and the script runs.   The user's time zone is California PST but the gs.prints out the following: Thursday, November 12, 2015 08:42 PM GMT through 08:42 PM GMT     where in your example it shows MDT assuming that is what your user was configured to be.   Thanks,   -e