Date Format: Other time stamp formatter flexibility?

Question

Sometimes a feed doesn't always follow the exact same time format for seconds and milliseconds and how many decimal points it has in a single date field. Velocity then seems to ignore the time stamp when it doesn't follow the specified formatting, leaving date field blank, unless it matches.

The first return row has a timestamp with 9 decimals however, not all of the data has 9 decimals, most don't have any decimals. Everything has seconds at least.

"2024-06-28T19:13:00Z""2024-06-28T19:05:52.502140873Z" Is there something I am missing? Should I be using a specific notation when it's like this? The documentation provided didn't seem to discuss rogue timestamps. I wouldn't mind it rounding up to seconds, but I at least want it to pass through.

Two rows don't get a date.... the others do:

JeffSilberberg · Answer

Yes, No Start Time.  Do that in the Field Mapper.

I am not really sure what to tell you about credits. Other than to talk to your Esri account team.

Teresa_Blader · Answer

Thanks for the responses Peter and Jeff!

So..... I would then be setting up the feed to not have a start time? Isn't that kind of integral to the feed? Instead I'll just set the dates as a string, not date, and then add the date with the real-time analytic with map fields?

Sadly, I'm basically full on my subscription so I was hoping to just use the feed in my maps. I kinda wonder, since there's almost always a real-time analytic associated to every feed, especially with stuff like this - if a feed + one real-time analytic could equal one mark on the subscription. I have another feed that the API will randomly send through a weird time stamp and that just gets nulled, but I've just been kinda ignoring it.

PeterNasuti · Answer

@Teresa_Blader I agree with @JeffSilberberg's suggestion above. Using the Map Fields tool for a field calculation depending on string length (or just using the text slicing to grab the correct elements) would be a better solution and can assign the "Start Time" tag. This could be a combination of the IIf function, Date function, etc. to parse the date correctly

The Velocity feeds and sources "date format" is expecting a single consistent date format. The behavior you are seeing is as designed where if the string can't be parsed to the date format the value is nulled.