Date

Pattern String Symbols - Many of the Date services require you to specify pattern strings describing the data's current format and/or the format to which you want it converted. For services that require a pattern string, use the symbols in the following table to describe the format of your data. For example, to describe a date in the January 15, 1999 format, you would use the pattern string MMMMM dd, yyyy. To describe the format 01/15/99, you would use the pattern string MM/dd/yy.

Symbol	Meaning	Presentation	Example
G	era designator	Text	AD
y	year	Number	1996 or 96
M	month in year	Text or Number	July or Jul or 07
d	day in month	Number	10
h	hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
H	hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
m	minute in hour	Number	30
s	second in minute	Number	55
S	millisecond	Number	978
E	day in week	Text	Tuesday or Tue
D	day in year	Number	189
F	day of week in month	Number	2 (2nd Wed in July)
w	week in year	Number	27
W	week in month	Number	2
a	am/pm marker	Text	PM
k	hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
z	time zone	Text	Pacific Standard Time or PST or GMT-08:00
Z	RFC 822 time zone (JVM 1.4 or later)	Number	-0800 (offset from GMT/UT)
'	escape for text	Delimiter
' '	single quote	Literal	'

Time Zones - When working with date services, you can specify time zones. The Earth is divided into 24 standard time zones, one for every 15 degrees of longitude. Using the time zone including Greenwich, England (known as Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT) as the starting point, the time is increased by an hour for each time zone east of Greenwich and decreases by an hour for each time zone west of Greenwich. The time difference between a time zone and the time zone including Greenwich, England (GMT) is referred to as the raw offset.

The following table identifies the different time zones for the Earth and the raw offset for each zone from Greenwich, England. The effects of daylight savings time are ignored in this table.

ID	Raw Offset	Name
MIT	-11	Midway Islands Time
HST	-10	Hawaii Standard Time
AST	-9	Alaska Standard Time
PST	-8	Pacific Standard Time
PNT	-7	Phoenix Standard Time
MST	-7	Mountain Standard Time
CST	-6	Central Standard Time
EST	-5	Eastern Standard Time
IET	-5	Indiana Eastern Standard Time
PRT	-4	Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands Time
CNT	-3.5	Canada Newfoundland Time
AGT	-3	Argentina Standard Time
BET	-3	Brazil Eastern Time
GMT	0	Greenwich Mean Time
ECT	+1	European Central Time
CAT	+2	Central Africa Time
EET	+2	Eastern European Time
ART	+2	(Arabic) Egypt Standard Time
EAT	+3	Eastern African Time
MET	+3.5	Middle East Time
NET	+4	Near East Time
PLT	+5	Pakistan Lahore Time
IST	+5.5	India Standard Time
BST	+6	Bangladesh Standard Time
VST	+7	Vietnam Standard Time
CTT	+8	China Taiwan Time
JST	+9	Japan Standard Time
ACT	+9.5	Australian Central Time
AET	+10	Australian Eastern Time
SST	+11	Solomon Standard Time
NST	+12	New Zealand Standard Time

Asia/Tokyo

America/Los_Angeles

GMT+2:00	All time zones 2 hours east of Greenwich (that is, Central Africa Time, Eastern European Time, and Egypt Standard Time)
GMT-3:00	All time zones 3 hours west of Greenwich (that is, Argentina Standard Time and Brazil Eastern Time)
GMT+9:30	All time zones 9.5 hours east of Greenwich (that is, Australian Central Time)

PST	Pacific Standard Time

Note: Because some three-letter abbreviations can represent multiple time zones, for example, "CST" could represent both U.S. "Central Standard Time" and "China Standard Time", all abbreviations are deprecated. Use the full name or custom time zone ID formats instead.

If you use an invalid date with a date service, the date service automatically translates the date to a legal date. For example, if you specify 1999/02/30 as input, the date service interprets the date as 1999/03/02 (two days after 2/28/1999).

If you use 00 for the month or day, the date service interprets 00 as the last month or day in the Gregorian calendar. For example, if you specify 00 for the month, the date service interprets it as 12.

If the pattern yy is used for the year, the date service uses a 50-year moving window to interpret the value of yy. The date service establishes the window by subtracting 49 years from the current year and adding 50 years to the current year. For example, if you are running Integration Cloud in the year 2000, the moving window would be from 1951 to 2050. The date service interprets 2-digit years as falling into this window (for example, 12 would be 2012, 95 would be 1995).

Service	Description
calculateDateDifference	Calculates the difference between two dates and returns the result as seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
compareDates	Compares two dates and returns the result as integer.
currentNanoTime	Returns the current time returned by the most precise system timer, in nanoseconds.
dateBuild	Builds a date String using the specified pattern and the specified date services.
dateTimeBuild	Builds a date/time string using the specified pattern and the specified date services.
dateTimeFormat	Converts date/time (represented as a String) string from one format to another.
elapsedNanoTime	Calculates the time elapsed between the current time and the given time, in nanoseconds.
formatDate	Formats a Date object as a string.
getCurrentDate	Returns the current date as a Date object.
getCurrentDateString	Returns the current date as a String in a specified format.
incrementDate	Increments a date by a specified period.