Setting Properties of Date, Timestamp and Duration Attributes

The Date attribute type represents dates, for example 12/09/95; the Timestamp attribute type represents date and time, for example 12/09/95 12:45 and the Duration attribute type represents the duration of an event, for example 2 weeks 10 days 3 hours. Most properties you need to specify for attributes of the Date, Timestamp and Duration types are common to all attribute types – see Common Properties. The properties specific to these types are:

This is the format of the date and timestamp attributes. The format is specified as text with special symbols. The following symbols are most frequently used:

For example, first of June 2004 will be displayed as 01/06/2004 if the format is specified as dd/MM/yyyy.

Rather than specifying the explicit format of the attribute you can choose “Take from locale” option if your application supports multiple languages. In this case the actual format of the attribute will be defined by the currently used locale – see Creating Applications in Different Languages.

The format of the Duration attribute is different. It reflects the capabilities of the Duration widget used to edit attributes of the Duration type. When you click on the Format property of the Duration attribute you are presented with a dialog where you need to select columns that will be present in the widget - days, hours, minutes and seconds. For each selected column you can specify a format. This format can have a # or 0 symbol and a word - for example “## hours” or “00 min”. You can also specify minimum and maximum value (for example 1 to 30 days) and step. If a step of the “minutes column” is 15, for example, the widget showing duration will prompt for 0, 15, 30 etc. minutes.

You can also define “duration shortcuts” that will be displayed at the top of the Duration widget. These “shortcuts” allow the user to quickly access frequently used durations.

Working with durations is shown in this video:

Some common presentation options, such as “label” and description are described in Common Properties. You can also define the following properties for the Date, Timestamp and Duration attributes:

By default Aware IM displays its own controls for Date and Timestamp attributes. These conrols include calendars and drop downs for the selection of time. Some browsers (especially mobile browsers) have their own controls for representing date and time. Select this property to use native browser controls for representing date and time.

These properties are only available for the attribute of the Timestamp type. Timestamp control is displayed as a combination of the date control and time control. The time control represents a drop down of times. You can specify the time increment and the boundaries for the values displayed in this drop down.

Options are:

1. Classic
2. Modern