Date & Time Service

The Flow XO Date and Time service lets you work with all the dates that you get as outputs from your connected apps, or the inputs you give to Flow XO Date/Time Fields. If you've just started working with Dates and Time in Flow XO in combination with your connected apps, you should definitely read the help documents for our special Dates & Times fields first.

There are no triggers for this service, but there are the following 3 actions:

Format Date - Give a date as input as get the date back in a different form. There's a full reference for all possible formats you can return here.
Get Relative Date - Return a human-readable output which describes the time from now until the date you gave.
Parse Date - This action returns a date 'object' in standard format which is used and recognized by most apps we connect to.

Let's look at some examples of each method below. We'll use the date and time 04/22/2027 12:47:32 in our examples, and also look at how passing a special Flow XO date/time is handled - we'll use Now.

Format Date

In this action, you'll give in your own date/time to the first input, and then tell Flow XO what you'd like the output to look like in the second input.

You'll be given a select box that gives you various options for formatting your given date - but if you're an advanced user you can use the pencil icon to edit the select box and enter your own format. There's a full reference for all possible formats here.

Let's look at our example date 04/22/2027 12:47:32 and our special input Now as an example.

Giving 04/22/2027 12:47:32 in the first input and dddd, MMMM DD, YYYY [at] hh:mm:ss A will give us the output Thursday, April 22, 2027 at 12:47:32 PM.

That's a really complex format request! Fortunately, it was selected directly from the select box. A simpler example would be, using our special Flow XO Date/Time input Now, passing the format dddd in the second input.

That would give us the simple output Thursday (Which is of course the Now in respect on when this article is being written - it's a Thursday today!)

As a final note - you might combine the output here with the Text (String) or Number services to work with the outputs you generate and really fine tune your outputs.

Get Relative Date

This is a useful action that's really simple to use - you can pass in any Date/Time as recognized by a Flow XO Date/Time field, and you'll get a human-readable (text) description of the time from / until the date you gave.

Giving to the input 04/22/2027 12:47:32 and Now will return as outputs 11 years from now and 1 second ago respectively. (Of course here, Now is Now.... but this is the minimum relative time in words.

Parse Date

The final action here is useful for making sure we can communicate with most app / web based systems. It just returns a standardized datetime 'object' based on a single input to a special Flow XO Date/Time field. You can use it when you need to get a date and time that should be reconsigned by all the apps you're working with - different apps might give different outputs, but the output you get here should be accepted by the majority of them.

In short, it's great for integration between different apps where formats can sometimes be different.

Giving our example inputs 04/22/2027 12:47:32 and Now provides the outputs 2027-04-22T12:47:32.000Z and 2016-01-21T15:03:20.230Z respectively. (Again, of course the second output there is the exact time that I ran a flow with this action.)

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