Rules for working with dates and times

Julian Knight — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 15:35:49 +0000

Dates and times are incredibly complex. They can be different in different countries, languages. They are often inconsistent and have weird edge-cases. These are some basic rules I apply when working with dates and times.

when handling dates and timestamps, here are the foundation rules that I work to:

Always use ISO date format where possible (YYYY-MM-DD)

So that there can be no ambiguity and so that date strings will naturally sort
Always work in UTC (Aka Zulu time or GMT) except when displaying to the user

To avoid weird errors, especially with timezone and daylight savings transitions. It also makes date/time calculations a LOT easier.
When needing a string format for timestamps, always use ISO format

e.g. 2020-03-07T15:27:46.123Z

These are always unambiguous and easily machine parsed.
When specifying decimal seconds in a timestamp, avoid more than 3 decimal places

The parsing tool used in node-red-contrib-moment to parse input dates in different formats cannot cope with more than 3dp and may return strange dates, a problem that I reported in May 2019 but hasn’t been resolved.

It should also be noted that I’m not sure that MomentJS can cope with more than 9dp.

Also worth noting that JavaScript’s Date native object only supports up to 3dp anyway and will turn anything beyond that into zero’s.

References

parseFormat function issue for >3dp seconds resolution

The worst thing about this issue is that it can result in an incorrect date being returned but does not give a warning.

No Code Business Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

Julian Knight — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 22:55:23 +0000

Resources to show you how to create code-free business solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

It used to be that you had to be an expert Microsoft developer to create business solutions in Microsoft SharePoint but that is no longer true. There are many ways for users and power users to create incredible solutions with no coding at all. Here are two resources that show you how:

No-code solutions using SharePoint 2013 Composites

“Let’s not write code, until we have to write code” A handbook showing all of the many different ways of creating no-code business solutions in SharePoint. Includes demos, labs, walkthroughs and tutorials.
Proven Ways to Build Robust, No-Code Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

An hour long video from Ignite 2015 dedicated to demonstrating no-code business solutions.

Slides

Information Management on Much Ado About IT

Rules for working with dates and times

References

No Code Business Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint