Perform various operations on dates. This action forms part of ThinkAutomation’s broader workflow automation software, enabling automated workflows to extract, format, compare and calculate dates and times for use in scheduling, time-based processing and business rules.

Automate Date and Time Processing

ThinkAutomation can automatically extract and manipulate dates and times contained within emails, documents, database records, API responses and other business data. Dates can be reformatted into a consistent format, converted to UTC or broken down into individual elements such as year, month, day, hour or minute.

Date calculations can also be performed automatically, allowing workflows to calculate the time between two dates or add and subtract days, weeks, months or years from an existing date.

Select the Date Operation Type:

Operation Type	Details
Get Date	Extract the date from any text or variable and return it to another variable in a predefined format. Enable the Convert To UTC option to convert the date to UTC.
Get Time	Extract just the time from any text or variable and return it to another variable in a predefined format.
Get Date and Time	Extract the date and time from any text or variable and return it to another variable in a predefined format.
Get Interval	Calculates an Interval between a From and To date and returns the value to a variable. The Interval can be Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months or Years. The interval can be returned as a number or duration text. Select from the Interval Format option. If Short Duration is selected then for interval will be returned as hh:mm:ss format. Long Duration will return as x Hours, x Minutes, x Seconds (depending on the Interval type).
Add To	Adds an interval Value to an existing date/time extracted from any text or variable and returns the new date time to a variable in a predefined format.
Subtract From	Subtracts an interval Value to an existing date/time extracted from any text or variable and returns the new date time to a variable in a predefined format.
Get Date and Time From Unix Timestamp	Get the date and time from a Unix timestamp. A Unix timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since 1st Jan 1970.
Get Unix Timestamp From Date and Time.	Gets the Unix timestamp from a date.
Get Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute, Second	Get a specific date part from any date/time.

Select the variable to receive the result from the Assign To Variable list.

When extracting and formatting dates you can select the Locale. This will default to the system locale.

Formatting

You can use this action to change the format of an existing date %variable% or extract a specific part of a datetime and assign it to a different variable. For the Format entry you can select one of the pre-defined formats, or type a specific format string.

Use the Get Date and Time operation. Set the From to the variable containing the date. Enter or select the required Format. Select the same variable from the Assign To Variable list if you want to update the existing variable.

See: Custom date and time format strings | Microsoft Docs for available Format strings.