Hi all,
I need to extract the start date/time from a “timer” field. I’ve used multiple Text formula fields to extract the elements and then I joined the elements in another text formula field. I’ve tried using a conditional rule to create a date field that can be recognised by the Calendar element. So far, no luck…
Any ideas much appreciated.
I struggled with this when building myself a little Time & Billing app. Here’s what I finally to work:
Assume the Timer field is called “Time Worked” You can treat it as a text field and create a text formula field equal to trim(left({Time Worked},14)) to extract the Start Date.
Similarly, you can get the elapsed time by creating a numeric formula and setting it to {Time Worked}
There HAS to be a better way (some standard Knack functions?) but I couldn’t find it and discovered this by trial and error.
May thanks @BajaRic !
My end result needs to be a date/time field that is recognised by a calendar element. Just cobbling the elements together does not seem to be sufficient for a recognised date field. The calendar does not recognise my concatenated string 
@houwtama, I don’t think it’s going to be possible to parse the string into a date/equation value nicely unfortunately. I don’t tend to use Timer fields for this reason.
You’d either have to set the value of a hidden date/time field on the same form as the timer using JS code, or split the timer into two date/time fields for start and end. The latter seems most reliable.
I stand corrected, as Richard’s method works well!
The Start [formula] text formula is left({Timer},21) to extract the start date.
I’m using a calendar in my app to show time worked by day, so I solved that problem somehow, but I’m away from my desk right now. As soon as I get beck, I’ll see what I did and let you know.
So, I guess the step I left out was that after I created the Start Date text field, I let Knack convert that string to a proper date by defining From Date as a Date/Time field with a conditional rule of Set to a Field and specifying the previously described Start Date text field. That seems to take care of the conversion from text to Date/Time. You can then create your calendar using the elapsed time I previously described and the From Date field described here. Again, I found this by trial and error.
I was going through some of the notes I’ve collected and ran across a page that I think I got from the Knavi agent. It may shed some additional light on the mysterious Timer data type but I don’t see any way to attach a PDF to this topic. Any suggestions?
The caveat here is that if the start and end times aren’t on the same day, the Timer string gets longer because the second date is inserted (see below). And if the start time had been 10:30, the resulting string would be at least one character longer!
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| 10/01/25 9:30 to 10/02/25 10:45 = 25.25 |
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