Search Crosser Knowledge Base

The ‘Time Stamp’ and ‘Time Difference’ Modules

The ‘Time Stamp’ Module is useful when working with timestamps. You can add the current date and time to your messages by leaving the ‘Source Property’ setting empty, but you can also use it to convert timestamps. Often timestamps from external systems are received as strings, which are not very useful if you want to use them in calculations. They may also be formatted in a way that is not accepted by your destinations. This can be solved with the ‘Time Stamp’ Module. Whatever the input format you can specify the format of the outgoing message, e.g. convert a timestamp string to a numeric value (epoch), either in seconds or milliseconds. Or you can convert to a string with another format by defining the format yourself. It’s also possible to add an offset to the timestamp, e.g. to convert between time zones.

When working with timestamps there is also the ‘Time Difference’ Module that gives you the difference between two timestamps as a real number in your preferred resolution (seconds, hours, days…).

About the author

Goran Appelquist

Göran has 20 years experience in leading technology teams. He’s the lead architect of our end-to-end solution and is extremely focused in securing the lowest possible Total Cost of Ownership for our customers.

"Hidden Lifecycle (employee) cost can account for 5-10 times the purchase price of software. Our goal is to offer a solution that automates and removes most of the tasks that is costly over the lifecycle.

My career started in the academic world where I got a PhD in physics by researching large scale data acquisition systems for physics experiments, such as the LHC at CERN. After leaving academia I have been working in several tech startups in different management positions over the last 20 years.

In most of these positions I have stood with one foot in the R&D team and another in the product/business teams. My passion is learning new technologies, use it to develop innovative products and explain the solutions to end users, technical or non-technical."