Time casting

Question

Hi Experts, 
 
 I have a requirement where we have to get the input from user for the time fields, User want the time to be entered in HH:MM:SS in 24hrs format where SS is optional. 
 Below are the input with expected stored output 
 Input1: 23:55:55 Output: 23:55:55 
 Input2: 10:32 Output: 10:32:00 
 Input3: 23 Output 23:00:00 
 Input4: 231000 Output: 23:10:00 
 Input5: 2359 Output: 23:59:00 
 Input6: 23 Output: 23:00:00 
 
 Kindly suggest for the feasibility of such expression as how can we achieve this.

Chris · Answer

You can accomplish this with a combination of a few different text functions. There are more considerations if you cannot restrict the input to an integer (or 3 integer fields), but something like this should get you what you need. This is designed as a rule with ri!timeIn as Text type. 
 Note this is a basic setup by just stripping all text such as the colons ":" by converting tointeger(), as such it will also allow any text between the numbers such as "23::::45-22", if the format restriction is a bigger concern we will have to apply additional validation on it (e.g., this works but is 'loose'). 
 if(
 rule!APN_isBlank(tointeger(ri!timeIn)),
 null,
 a!localVariables(
 local!formatted: substitute(
 padright(
 tointeger(
 ri!timeIn
 ),
 6
 ),
 " ",
 0
 ),
 
 concat(
 if(
 left(local!formatted,2)>23,
 "00",
 left(local!formatted,2)
 ),
 ":",
 if(
 mid(local!formatted,3,2)>59,
 "00",
 mid(local!formatted,3,2)
 ),
 ":",
 if(
 right(local!formatted,2)>59,
 "00",
 right(local!formatted,2)
 ),
 )
 )
)