Supported field formats

When visualizing data through time, you must specify the Time field that contains the time values. These time values can be stored in date, string, or numeric field types. For best performance, it is recommended that you store your time values in a date field type.

Learn more about best practices for storing temporal data

You can choose to convert the string or numeric fields containing time values to a date field using the Convert Time Field tool. This tool allows you to convert time values stored in a variety of formats and store those into a date field.

Learn more about converting time values stored in a string or numeric field into a date field.

If you really want to use the time values stored in a string or numeric field type, you must determine the supported date format (see list below) and store the time values in your data based on formats. Also, you will have to specify the field format when setting the time properties of your temporal data.

Supported string field formats

• YYYY
• YYYYMM
• YYYY/MM
• YYYY-MM
• YYYYMMDD
• YYYY/MM/DD
• YYYY-MM-DD
• YYYYMMDDhhmmss
• YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss
• YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
• YYYYMMDDhhmmss.s
• YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss.s
• YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.s

Supported numeric field formats

• YYYY
• YYYYMM
• YYYYMMDD
• YYYYMMDDhhmmss

where

• YYYY = four-digit year
• MM = two-digit month (01=January)
• DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
• hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (A.M./P.M. not allowed)
• mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
• ss = two digits of second (00 through 59)
• s = one digit of millisecond (0 through 9)

Tip:

For temporal data with sub-second granularity, you can choose to store your time values in one of the following formats - 'YYYYMMDDhhmmss.s', 'YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss.s', or 'YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss.s'. Using this format, you can store time values that represent 1/1000th of a second (i.e., 1 millisecond), 1/100th of a second or 1/10th of a second. For example, if you want to visualize data every millisecond, you can store the time value as '200911231030.560". In this case, the data will draw at the 560th millisecond (for the time 200911231030) when visualizing it with the time slider, which has a time step interval set to 1 millisecond.