There are times when me and my team would like for a user to pick only time, without the date. The columns can be configured this way, but the actual date picker component can’t—it’s date or date & time only. I’d like Glide to have an actual time picker (not that 3-column-scrolling mess that’s in the date component) with a style similar to that of the Material time picker.
Glide actually used this same design as recently as a few months ago, but they decided to change it to… this.
Feel free to upvote your topic.
A date column formatted to show only time still is a date column and has an underlying date and time that’s actually stored.
If there was a time picker option, what would you expect for an underlying date to go with that time? Jan 1, 1970? Today? Something else?
If it could store only a time value, what would you expect that stored value to be? Would it be stored as plain text? Would it be stored in decimal form of 1 day (ex 12:00pm would be stored as 0.5)? All date and time math in glide is based on days or fractions of days. Would it respect regional 12 or 24 hour formats? Would it respect time zone differences?
Do you plan to use it with any math to add or subtract time from a date, or is purely for display purposes only?
Could it be combined with a date in some way, or would it always be independent? Should there be a separate Time column type?
Would you expect it to work with a calendar component or any date based sorting or filtering?
I ask questions like this just to stoke discussion on what people actually expect if they were given a time picker. This topic comes up often, but it seems that nobody wants to discuss their expectations. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the need for one, but I’d personally like to understand what people are expecting from something like this, and how people plan to use the value from a time picker. I feel like I could come up with several issues after the fact where something may or may not work as expected when they actually try to use or display the stored value.
I think it’s a lot more complex than just adding a time picker. It’s all about intended use of that value after the fact. I’m genuinely curious on other people’s thoughts when they start to consider the back end and beyond just having a time picker…looking beyond the surface.
In my opinion, a separate Time column type would be needed with it’s own formatting options and a value stored as a decimal so it can easily be used for date math down the road. Curious what others think.
On the flip side, a standard html time picker stores time in 24 hour format, but would be difficult to use for date math unless glide does something behind the scenes to allow date math to work with a time column type. Ultimately Glide uses standardized html component for date and date/time, so I would assume it would be the same case for a time picker.
I do not like the new time picker for PC, it sucks LOL
Yeah, it’s not the prettiest thing, but…
In an ideal world, I’d like the following:
For check-in apps, capturing the time (separate from the date) is a nicer, quicker interface for users. That is, select a day from a list of available dates, then use a time picker to enter a time. The end result is the selected date with the entered time. To “create” this after-the-fact as a usable Date/Time column is not simple, especially if you have multiple users who have different device/locale settings that cause the underlying date formatting to potentially be different.
I like the idea of a Make Date/Time column. As long as it’s more stable than other column types like Format Date or Text to Date.
oh my goodness!!
Don’t you dare try to inflict that backwards formatting on the rest of the world! 
I created a template a while back that does exactly this…
I don’t think the template creates a single Date/Time column (with date and chosen time in one field) that can be used for things like the Start time in the Calendar collection, or checking if something is on/before/after another date/time field.
I’ve done this before with combinations of format date columns, math columns, etc, but it’s overly complex for something that seems like it should be straightforward.
Yes, it does.
If you take a look at the Events table, there are two datetime columns for Event Start & Event finish. Each of these contains a full datetime value. The Add/Edit screens manipulate these columns. Event Date is a computed column, which extracts the date from the Event Start time.
Saving as a single datetime value was a specific goal when I created the template (I actually created the feature for a client App and then decided to make a template with it).
Whoops — that does look good! Haha… taking a closer look now!
Wowzers that is nice! Works very well and once you know that Math formula, isn’t too tough to understand. Thanks!
