Date field to Text field automatically

Question

I would like to automatically convert data from a survey populating a Created_Date field (ex: 10/10/2022 5:37:08 PM) after submission, into a Created_Date_Text field (ex: 20221010).

The geoprocessing tool Convert Time Field works fine but only on a one-time use basis. The text field is not updated when more data are added to the layer. I tried to schedule a recurrent Run but it's not working.

So I was wondering if someone would know of a Arcade/Python script to make the conversion automatically that I could insert into the Calculate Field tool for the text field.

Thanks.

RudyJamet · Answer

Thanks for your input David. I'll look into it.

DavidSolari · Answer

The "strftime" method on Python datetime objects is the go-to way to get a stable text version of that data. Here's an example for Calculate Field:

!Created_Date!.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

For a full list of format codes check out https://strftime.org. If you want true live updates you'll probably want to look into Attribute Rules, here's an example for Arcade:

Text($feature["Created_date"], "Y-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")

The reference for this is https://developers.arcgis.com/arcade/function-reference/text_functions/#text. There's disagreements in how the format codes work between the reference and the sample code so play around with the various opstions.