Time is an important data element. Time is stored throughout DAQFactory as the number of seconds (with decimals) since January 1st, 1970. This is one of many standard ways of storing time, and provides the necessary precision (down to the microsecond) for anything DAQFactory may do. This number is also very easy for a computer to deal with. However, this number is somewhat meaningless to us humans. There are many times when an absolute date and time would be nice to use in an expression, and DAQFactory provides a simple way of entering these values without having to calculate the number of seconds since 1970, and in a non-location specific form. The form is:
xxYxxMxxD xxHxxMxx.xxxS
The YMDHMS are not case sensitive and are actually easier to read in lowercase when real numbers are used. The x's correspond to the desired year, month, day, hour, minute or second. Decimal seconds are completely valid. The S and the space are also completely optional. Since you probably don't want to have to always fully specify your date, you can skip some parameters and let DAQFactory fill them in for you. For example if you do not enter in the year, the current year will be used. Likewise for month, day and hour. If you don't specify minutes or seconds, 0 will be used. For example, given today is October 1, 2001, 1:31:23.345pm
Fully qualified time: 01y10m01d 13h31m23.345
No date specified: 13h31m23.345
No year specified: 10m01d 13h31m23.345
No hour specified: 31m23.345
No minute or seconds specified: 13h this will actually give October 1,2001, 1:00:00.000pm
No seconds specified: 13h31m this will give October 1,2001 1:31:00.000pm
Just seconds specified: 365s this will give October 1,2001 1:06:05.000pm. Note that the s is required here, otherwise DAQFactory will just think you mean the number 365.
