Date and time

Introduction

There are two perspectives on dates and times with Orbeon Forms:

• the perspective of the user of the form, where those are human-readable

• the perspective of the data storage, where those are stored in a standard, human-language-independent format

In this page we discuss dates and times from the perspective of the data.

Basic format

When using XML, date and time formats usually follow the formats defined in XML Schema, which are a subset of ISO 8601 formats. Specifically, the formats for date, time, and dateTime are specified here:

• date

• time

• dateTime

In practice, the base format is pretty simple, for example:

• date: 2012-09-17

• time: 17:24:00

• dateTime: 2012-09-17T17:24:00

All fields have a fixed number of digits.

Fractional seconds

In addition, you can add any fractional seconds to the time:

• 2012-09-17T17:24:00.1234

Timezones

Things get a bit more complicated if you add optional timezone information. You can have things like:

• 2012-09-17T17:24:00Z (which means UTC time)

• 2012-09-17T17:24:00+05:00 (timezone indicated with an offset)

For a full reference, the XML Schema documentation linked above is the reference, as Orbeon Forms follows that specification.