Action between two time strings

[wofforduk]

Hi There - I don't suppose there is an easy way to do this, I have 2 messages, one with a start time and one with an end time. I'd like to trigger a response/set a global message if the start and end time are within the current time.. does this make sense? My Node red skills are pretty poor but am trying!

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[RavinderSingh13]

@wofforduk

I'd like to trigger a response/set a global message if the start and end time are within the current time

Could you please explain more on this one? Do you mean start and end time are same? Then trigger an action? If yes then request you to kindly do mention your node-red json code in your if possible so that we can get a glimpse of what's going on, cheers.

Thanks,
Ravinder Singh

[zenofmud]

@wofforduk welcome to the forum.

First your flow wouldn't import so I edited it so it would (see note at end of this post)

Looking at the data in the inject node, it looks like your python program is returning a json string. If you push it thru a json object, this is what you get:

Notice all the dates are strings. To compare them you could use
x = Date(string_date)
here is a function node that will change all the date strings in your object to milliseconds.

let nextRunStart = msg.payload.nextRunStart
let nextRunEnd = msg.payload.nextRunEnd
let updatedAt = msg.payload.updatedAt

let startDt = msg.payload.timesObj[0].startDt
let endDt = msg.payload.timesObj[0].endDt


msg.payload.nextRunStart = Date.parse(nextRunStart)
msg.payload.nextRunEnd = Date.parse(nextRunEnd)
msg.payload.updatedAt = Date.parse(updatedAt)

msg.payload.timesObj[0].startDt = Date.parse(startDt)
msg.payload.timesObj[0].endDt = Date.parse(endDt)

return msg;

or you might want to edit your python code to return the values as time to eliminate the need for the conversion in your flow.

hopefully this will help you deal with the rest of your flow.

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[wofforduk]

Thank you! that has certainly cleaned my flow up really well! and thanks for the tips on posting code - im a bit new here!