Please tell me about formatDate ().

[Kurumi]

I want to set the acquired date in the specified format in the client script. During my research, I found the function "formatDate ();" used in the link below.

・https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=3870aca4db083490fb1e0b55ca961986&view_source=searchResult
・https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=de3ac9dcdb4f80104819fb243996194c&view_source=searchResult
・https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=410070aedbf0f340fff8a345ca961993


Please tell me about this formatDate () ;.
・ Is this defined by servicenow? Is it defined in JavaScript?
・Please let me know if there is a page or reference that explains the details.

[Kieran Anson · Accepted solution]

Hi Kurumi,

formatDate is a ServiceNow provided function. It isn't actually documented but I did do a bit of documentation for the Hacktoberfest Dev piece

code-snippets/Date Management.js at main · ServiceNowDevProgram/code-snippets (github.com)

[Hitoshi Ozawa]

It's a ServiceNow client script function.

var <string> = formatDate(<variable of Date type>, <date format>);

Format seems to be format allowed in Java's SimpleDateFormat.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

Often, another ServiceNow client script variable, g_user_date_time_format format or g_user_date_format, is used to obtain the current user's date format. As the name suggests, g_user_date_time_format is format of date/time while g_user_date_format is format of date.

There is also getDateFromFormat(). This returns a timestamp. That is, number of seconds from 1970/1/1 00:00:00

var <int> = getDateFromFormat(<variable of Date type>, <date format>);

When doing date calculation on the client side, care must be taken if Daylight time saving time is used in the timezone. GlideDateTime takes care of the Daylight saving calculation but client script would need to implement it if required or use GlideAjax() to call script include to do the calculation on the server.