Streams Highlight – Supported Timestamp Formats

[jessica_smith]

We've all been checking out the new Streams feature in Tandem. While we have several resources that can be found here, one detail that we want to highlight is the supported timestamp format that Tandem recognizes when data is sent to a Connection. Proper timestamp formatting is just one factor that will allow data to be stored in Tandem and visualized in charts and heatmaps. 

Tandem currently supports the following timestamp formats 

• Unix Epoch In milliseconds and seconds since Jan 1, 1970, represented as a whole number in JSON 
  

  Date	Unix Epoch Date
  (seconds) September 16, 2004 11:59:58 PM	1095379198
  (milliseconds) September 16, 2004 11:59:58 PM	1095379198000

  Unix Epoch Format Explained (by Google) 
  The Unix epoch is at the beginning of 1970, meaning that any timestamp prior to 1970 needs to be represented as a negative number representing the number of seconds until January 1st, 1970, which is represented in Unix Epoch as 00:00:00 UTC.
  
• RFC 3339, represented as a string in JSON, any of the: 
  

  Format	Format Example for January 2, 2006, 3:45pm and 59 seconds
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss+HH:mm	“2006-01-02T23:45:59+08:00”
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ	“2006-01-02T15:45:59Z”
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.SSS+HH:mm	“2006-01-02T23:45:59.789+08:00”
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.SSSZ	“2006-01-02T15:45:59.789Z”

  RFC Format Explained 

  • full date: 4-digit year, 2-digit month, and 2-digit day of the month 
  • required 'T' separator 
  • full time: 2-digit 24h format hours, 2-digit minutes, 2-digit seconds, with optional fractional 3-digit milliseconds component 
  • Timezone offset ±HH:mm or the Zulu' Z' suffix indicating UTC 0h offset.