Date and Time formats management logic

The Bootstrap admin dashboard has to juggle with different date and time formats depending on the situation. Here's how it works.

The different Date and Time formats

List of the date, datetime and time formats used in PHP CRUD Generator

Pages Usage Language Format
READ lists Human readable date translated according to the user language PHP with intl extension enabled ICU *
READ lists Human readable date NOT translated PHP without intl extension enabled PHP date format **
CREATE / UPDATE forms Datepicker plugins Javascript Pickadate plugin formats ***
PHP Objects Database date, time and datetime fields PHP/MySQL Y-m-d H:i:s

*ICU - https://unicode-org.github.io/icu-docs/apidoc/released/icu4c/classSimpleDateFormat.html#details

**PHP date formats list: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

***Pickadate date formats list: https://amsul.ca/pickadate.js/date/

Management of PHP/JavaScript date and time formats in the admin dashboard

The Generator and Admin panel date & time formats

  1. When you set a date / time format in a generator READ list, your choice is stored in internal file (generator/database/phpcg/[your_table].json).

    The format stored is the Javascript format

    The admin form's date & time pickers will use this format, + an hidden field with a "_submit" suffix to send the values in MySQL date / time format.

  2. The TWIG READ list template will later need to convert the date / time from the MySQL value to the human readable format.
    For this purpose, the Javascript format is converted by the generator to PHP ICU by generator/class/generator/TemplatesUtilities.php. The generated PHP ICU format will be passed as argument in the TWIG template to convert the MySQL date / time to the human readable format.

    The function is pickerdateToPhpdate($pickerdate)

  3. The item class builds the object value using the PHP/MySQL format (no format conversion)

  4. the READ list TWIG template calls the formatDate($date, $format) function in vendor/twig/twig/lib/Twig/Extension/CrudTwigExtension.php

    The given $date is in PHP/MySQL format and can be a date, a time or a datetime.

    The given $format is the ICU format.

    • if PHP intl extension is enabled it'll show the date translated according to your languages settings with IntlDateFormatter::formatObject() using Locale::getDefault()
    • if PHP intl extension is not enabled it converts the ICU date / time to the classic PHP date format

Random datetime formats examples

The datetimes below are generated from a random format using the same logic as the CRUD Generator.

$pickerdate
yyyy mm dd hh i A
$icu_format
yyyy MM dd hh m a
$icu_date
2023 11 29 05 42 pm
$php_format
Y m d h i a
$php_date
2023 11 29 05 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy mmm d H i A
$icu_format
yy MMM d H m a
$icu_date
23 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$php_format
y M j G i a
$php_date
23 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yyyy mmm dd H i a
$icu_format
yyyy MMM dd H m a
$icu_date
2023 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$php_format
Y M d G i a
$php_date
2023 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy m d hh i a
$icu_format
yy M d hh m a
$icu_date
23 11 29 05 42 pm
$php_format
y n j h i a
$php_date
23 11 29 05 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy mmm dd H i A
$icu_format
yy MMM dd H m a
$icu_date
23 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$php_format
y M d G i a
$php_date
23 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy m ddd HH i a
$icu_format
yy M eee HH m a
$icu_date
23 11 Wed 17 42 pm
$php_format
y n D H i a
$php_date
23 11 Wed 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy mm dddd H i A
$icu_format
yy MM eeee H m a
$icu_date
23 11 Wednesday 17 42 pm
$php_format
y m l G i a
$php_date
23 11 Wednesday 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yy m ddd HH i a
$icu_format
yy M eee HH m a
$icu_date
23 11 Wed 17 42 pm
$php_format
y n D H i a
$php_date
23 11 Wed 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yyyy mmm dd H i A
$icu_format
yyyy MMM dd H m a
$icu_date
2023 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$php_format
Y M d G i a
$php_date
2023 Nov 29 17 42 pm
$pickerdate
yyyy mmmm d h i a
$icu_format
yyyy MMMM d h m a
$icu_date
2023 November 29 5 42 pm
$php_format
Y F j g i a
$php_date
2023 November 29 5 42 pm

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