Skybrud.Umbraco.Time is a small package for Umbraco 8 that adds three new property editors:

• Date Picker - returning an instance of EssentialsDate
• Time Picker - returning an instance of TimeOffset
• UNIX Timestamp - returning an instance of EssentialsTime

While Umbraco already features a property editor for picking a date (or date and time), the property editors in this package handles more specific use cases (eg. the date picker will return EssentialsDate instead of DateTime).

The Umbraco 9 version of this package is only available via NuGet. To install the package, you can use either .NET CLI:

dotnet add package Skybrud.Umbraco.Time --version 2.0.0

or the older NuGet Package Manager:

Install-Package Skybrud.Umbraco.Time -Version 2.0.0

Umbraco 8
For the Umbraco 8 version of this package, see the v1/main branch instead.

Examples of the date and time property editors respectively

The date picker uses Umbraco's own date picker view, but ensures that the view is configured for selecting a date without any time. The property editor should be used in situations where only the date matters, and as such it returns an instance of EssentialsDate instead of the normal DateTime.

The EssentialsDate class comes from our Skybrud.Essentials package, which provides extended functionality for working with dates compared to DateTime.

Calling the ToString method on said class will result in a string representation of the date formatted using the ISO 8601 date format, which is yyyy-MM-dd - eg. 2020-08-07. The same format is used when serializing the value using Json.NET.

As of this time, the date picker currently doesn't have any prevalues (data type configuration).

The time picker uses a custom view for letting editors pick a time without any relation to a specific date. The picker returns an instance of TimeOffset representing the selected time, and the Hours and Minutes properties can be used to read the selected selected time.

Calling the ToString method will result in a string representation of the date formatted as HH:mm. The ToString method is also used when serializing the value using Json.NET.

The output format of the ToString method can be controlled via the Output format prevalue option in the data type configuration. The format is that of the TimeSpan class in .NET. Notice that the format is different from that of the DateTime class, so a format like hh\:mm will result is something like 15:45 (which for DateTime would have been HH:mm).

The UNIX timestamp property editor looks like the picker for date and time that ships with Umbraco, but instead of of saving the date and time as DateTime in the database, this property editor will save the date and time as a UNIX timestamp - which is the amount of seconds since the start of the UNIX epoch. And instead of DateTime, the property value type will instead be the EssentialsTime class.

Aditionally, data types using this property editor may be configured to adjust the date and time to a specific time zone, which then is reflected in the EssentialsTime instance.

Calling the ToString method on a EssentialsTime will result in a string representation of the date and time formatted using the ISO 8601 date time format, which is yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssK - eg. 1988-08-17T08:37:00+02:00. The same format is used when serializing the value using Json.NET.