Survey123 Round Time to nearest Quarter?

Anonymous User

I created a survey that has a time field. In the default, I have now(). Staff have began to start using the survey and they have asked me If I could possibly change the time so that it rounded to the nearest quarter. For instance, if the current time is 11:31, it would round the time to 11:30. 

JamesTedrick

Hi Nickholai,

It's a bit easier to understand how to get the start of the 15 minute time that you are in, so I'll start with that.  You can use the modulo function to find out how much over quarter hour you are, and then subtract that from the time:

${timeValue} - ${timeValue} mod (15*60*1000)

In this example, I'm calculating from another question's value; you could substitute with now().  

Note that 15 minutes is

(15 minutes) * (60 seconds / minute) * (1000 milliseconds / seconds) = 900000ms

To round, we need to divide by 15 minutes to get where an increase of 1 to a number represents an increase of 15 minutes, round (so we find the nearest 15 minute increment), and then re-multiply by 15 minutes to get us back to out time units: 

date(round(${timeValue} div (900000),0)*(900000))

Note that a date time question calculated this way will update as the source value changes; a time question does not (but is calculated when a form is loaded).

Also note that we will be bringing significant changes to how dates are handled and calculated in 2.2; expect a blog post in GeoNet highlighting this soon.