TrackMage

Relative Supported Date and Time Formats

This article covers various relative date and time formats used in the Schedule Delay field on the email template settings page, which includes triggers with time intervals. For tips on editing email templates in TrackMage to send personalized notifications to your customers, please see this article.

 

Used Symbols


 

Day-based Notations


Note:

Relative statements are always processed after non-relative statements. This makes "+1 week july 2008" and "july 2008 +1 week" equivalent.
Exceptions to this rule are: "yesterday", "midnight", "today", "noon" and "tomorrow". Note that "tomorrow 11:00" and "11:00 tomorrow" are different. Considering today's date of "July 23rd, 2008" the first one produces "2008-07-24 11:00" where as the second one produces "2008-07-24 00:00". The reason for this is that those five statements directly influence the current time.


Note:

Observe the following remarks when the current day-of-week is the same as the day-of-week used in the date/time string. The current day-of-week could have been (re-)calculated by non-relative parts of the date/time string however.

  1. "dayname" does not advance to another day. (Example: "Wed July 23rd, 2008" means "2008-07-23").
  2. "number dayname" does not advance to another day. (Example: "1 wednesday july 23rd, 2008" means "2008-07-23").
  3. "number week dayname" will first add the number of weeks, but does not advance to another day. In this case "number week" and "dayname" are two distinct blocks. (Example: "+1 week wednesday july 23rd, 2008" means "2008-07-30").
  4. "ordinal dayname" does advance to another day. (Example "first wednesday july 23rd, 2008" means "2008-07-30").
  5. "number week ordinal dayname" will first add the number of weeks, and then advances to another day. In this case "number week" and "ordinal dayname" are two distinct blocks. (Example: "+1 week first wednesday july 23rd, 2008" means "2008-08-06").
  6. "ordinal dayname 'of' " does not advance to another day. (Example: "first wednesday of july 23rd, 2008" means "2008-07-02" because the specific phrase with 'of' resets the day-of-month to '1' and the '23rd' is ignored here).

Also observe that the "of" in "ordinal space dayname space 'of' " and "'last' space dayname space 'of' " does something special.

  1. It sets the day-of-month to 1.
  2. "ordinal dayname 'of' " does not advance to another day. (Example: "first tuesday of july 2008" means "2008-07-01").
  3. "ordinal dayname " does advance to another day. (Example: "first tuesday july 2008" means "2008-07-08", see also point 4 in the list above).
  4. "'last' dayname 'of' " takes the last dayname of the current month. (Example: "last wed of july 2008" means "2008-07-30")
  5. "'last' dayname" takes the last dayname from the current day. (Example: "last wed july 2008" means "2008-06-25"; "july 2008" first sets the current date to "2008-07-01" and then "last wed" moves to the previous Wednesday which is "2008-06-25").


Note:

Relative month values are calculated based on the length of months that they pass through. An example would be "+2 month 2011-11-30", which would produce "2012-01-30". This is due to November being 30 days in length, and December being 31 days in length, producing a total of 61 days.


To set up and learn more about email notifications that inform your clients about their parcel statuses, visit this page.


If you have any further inquiries, please don't hesitate to contact us.

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