Introduction

Better Date Parser helps with ****extracting and parsing dates from text strings within your app. It leverages the capabilities of the Luxon and Chrono-node libraries to interpret dates in various formats, languages (locales), and time zones. This plugin is ideal for applications that need to process user-inputted dates, extract dates from unstructured text, or handle dates across different regions and time zones.

Usage Instructions

Client-Side Parsing

• Exposed States:
  • The plugin element exposes states that provide the current user's time zone information:
    • Current UTC offset
    • Current timezone
  • The plugin element also exposes the state that provides the parsed list of dates from the properties. This list can be empty if no dates are found.
• Usage:
  • Use the exposed states to obtain the user's time zone details, which can be passed to server-side actions.

Server-Side Action

1. Configure the Workflow:
   • Create a workflow that triggers the **Parse dates (**server-side) action provided by the plugin.
2. Set Action Fields:
   • Date string: The text containing the date(s) you want to extract.
   • Date template: (Optional) A format template if the date format is known.
   • Parsed as UTC: Set to "yes" to parse dates in UTC or "no" to use the user's local time zone.
   • Locale: Specify the language/locale for parsing (e.g., 'en' for English).
   • UTC offset: Use the Current UTC offset exposed state from the plugin element.
   • Timezone: Use the Current timezone exposed state from the plugin element.
3. Handle the Output:
   • The action returns Parsed dates, which can be a single date or a list of dates based on the Return list setting.
   • Use the parsed dates for further processing, display, or storage in your application.

Example Workflow

1. User Input:
   • Allow the user to input text that may contain date information (e.g., a message or a note).
2. Trigger Parsing:
   • When the user submits the text, trigger the Parse dates action in a workflow.
3. Display Results:
   • Use the Parsed dates output to display the extracted dates to the user or to perform date-related operations.

Workload Usage

The server-side action uses workload as it runs on the server. This generally costs about 2 WU per action run. If nobody in your app has used this workflow in the last 15 minutes or so, it will take a few seconds to ‘warmup’. After this, it should respond pretty quickly.

Field Details