[Implemented] Variables and Devices for date, time and day of week

---

Would be nice to have variables for current day, time and day of week.
A current workaround is to use rules. E.g. for day of week:

If it is sunday then $dayofweek.value = "So"
If it is monday then $dayofweek.value = "Mo"
etc.

in combination with a VariablesDevice.

but this is not so elegant.

Wouldn’t it be senseful to extend the cron plugin in this case? For normal this plugin is installed with every pimatic installation and could easily provide the current date, time and additional information.

At least the day of week isn’t that easy by definition, because it’s handled in a different way in different countries. In Germany the Monday would be day 1, in other countries its already day 2. See: https://www.timeanddate.com/date/week-numbers.html

@developer Any other ideas?

@saxnpaule said in Variables and Devices for date, time and day of week:

At least the day of week isn’t that easy by definition, because it’s handled in a different way in different countries. In Germany the Monday would be day 1, in other countries its already day 2. See: https://www.timeanddate.com/date/week-numbers.html

Agree, time and calendar are complex matters and dealing with those aspects can easily evolve into a project of its own. My first thoughts on this are

• Support localized values for time and calendar properties according to the locale setting on the pimatic system and support the respective ISO siblings according to ISO 8601 and ISO 2015. Optionally, support other locales on the fly
• Use a library to support the acquisition of time and calendar values. One candidate for this is moment.js
• Implement the values as device attributes to be able to provide them a as an option and decide whether you want to localized or ISO values.
• The previous may be done as part of cron, another plugin, or as part of the pimatic core. I think the cron plugin does not provide features which ease the implementation of time and calendar attributes

If you agree, I would give it a try and create a pimatic-datetime plugin that provides the following variables:

• localized time e.g. 07:33
• localized date e.g. 22.03.2018
• localized datetime e.g. Do 22. Mär 07:33:47 CET 2018
• formated datetime by given format (device attribute) e.g. YYYYMMdd HH: mm:ss --> 20180322 07:33:47
• day of week (localized) e.g. 4
• day of month (localized) e.g. 22
• unix timestamp

These should be the optional device attributes:

• locale or default system locale
• datetime format

I think updating the values every two or five seconds should be enough. Because of that, providing the current seconds doesn’t make sense.

@saxnpaule Yes, this will be great. As said earlier I think moment.js is a good starting point as it should serve all need even though it appears to have some bugs, at least, “day of week” did not work for me as expected (see code below, may be I am missing a package?!). However, there are also some alternative libraries out there which may better serve the specific needs.

I think updating the values every two or five seconds should be enough. Because of that, providing the current seconds doesn’t make sense.

Yes, but I think the update cycle timer should be configurable.

var moment = require('moment-timezone');


moment.locale('de');
console.log(moment().format('LLLL'));
console.log(moment().format());
console.log(moment().tz("Europe/Berlin").format('LLLL'));
console.log(moment().weekday());
moment.locale('en-AU');
console.log(moment().weekday());
moment.locale('vi-VT');
console.log(moment().tz("Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh").format('LLLL'));

First version of plugin is ready to test: https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/4246/new-plugin-pimatic-datetime/

Implemented and Vote4Close.

Hi @SaxnPaule,

Great work! Just installed and having a fiddle, works really well so far.
Might have come across a refresh bug: When using HH:mm:SS in the dateformat attribute it seems SS is incrementing but doesnt reset to 0 after 60 seconds). Need to test a bit more, and will let you know or I’ll submit a pull request on Github if I come around to it.

+1 for closing feature request

Use ss instead of SS

@saxnpaule yup, that does it. Might want to update the description string with the dateformat attrib. it says HH:mm:SS

I changed the description. Will be part of the next release.

I think this feature request can be closed. Thanks to @SaxnPaule for implementing the datetime device!

Agree, Thanks @SaxnPaule for your excellent contribution