I am playing with different ways to enter time and calculate total time. I am considering capturing time in a text format because I have noticed that the now() option can be buggy under certain circumstances (like if the survey crashes, the time refreshes to recovery time. Also, the species sighted time captured in a repeat section refreshes my route start time under some conditions). I am wondering if it is possible to calculate total time is the time is captured as text (military time). If so, how?
Many thanks.
Hi Bonnie,
This is pretty easy to do - you need to have a calculation that extracts the hour part and minute part using substr(), converts the to integers and then does the subtraction. Assuming you require a leading zeros for hour and minute, the function for the time in minutes is (t1 is start time, t2 is end time):
60*(int(substr(${t2}, 0, 2)) - int(substr(${t1}, 0, 2))) + (int(substr(${t2}, 3, 5)) - int(substr(${t1}, 3, 5)))
That being said, we are improving the behavior of now() in the next release of Survey123.
Awesome. It worked great. I cannot wait to see your improvements. Most of my issues with the survey I just tested were with how time functioned in the App. (p.s I hope you are making the time wheel more user friendly. esp. if you don't use the now() function.)