Skip to main content

I want to collect date and time information in a client-facing event request form, but the only option I see in Typeform is to create *three* fields to collect this data: a date field, followed by an hour field and a minute field. Makes me tired just thinking about it!

Is there any simpler way to collect this information through Typeform? A datetime field, perhaps? As it is, the user experience of supplying this information is quite unpleasant, and the data collected is in an unhelpful format for import into our Airtable base.

Hi @tilde Thanks for stopping by! We don’t currently have a date/time field all merged into one field, so you would need to add three different fields. 😕 You could ask this in a short text question, but if you’re passing the data to another product. 

@john.desborough you don’t have a workaround for this by chance, do you? I feel like this is something you might have been thinking of late at night ha!


@tilde @Liz - well i do have a workaround for you but it means you have to use Google sheets (or some other spreadsheet) but it is not a perfect solution with out getting some clarification. 

 

if you use a Date question and dump it into Google sheets, you get two date fields in the entry: the input from the user and the submitted at date field. 

the submitted at date field is a date time field in Google sheets by default

the default Date option does not include the time BUT you can format the field to have the time shown - however, that time defaults to midnight + a tick 

you can see this in the image below. 

now, this relates to the context: if you are the monitor assigned to track the sessions and trying to capture the start time and end time of a mainstage session for example, you could create a form along these lines that would submit (manually) the start time for a selected session then pass you to another typeform to wait for the session to end at which point you could click a link that ‘end of session’ typeform to lock down the ending time. the form would redirect upon completion back to the first form for you to select the next session you want to track from the list and then .. rinse and repeat

while not perfect it would give you the start and time of the sessions based on the submitted at field (without requiring any data entry all you need is a trigger question to force the submit). in that context. 

i have probably missed the boat entirely on the context BUT if you can provide some more details, i will set the 7 voices in my head to solving that problem.. 

 

des


Thanks to both of you for your quick responses! I appreciate you thinking through this with me.

Unfortunately, the datetime information we hope to collect has nothing to do with the date or time that the form is submitted. The use case is a form to receive requests for services on arbitrary dates and times, as determined by our clients.

The issue I see with using a single text field is data validation. Making sure that the data entered by a user in Typeform is compatible with the datetime field in Airtable, even filtered through Zapier, is a bit of a challenge. But it sounds like that’s the best solution for now. Unless Typeform has internal data-validation logic that can convert the text field into an ISO timestamp?

 


Hi @tilde We don’t currently have this feature, but I can share this with our product team. If you have any particular use cases you’d like to share along with it, please let me know! :grinning:


Reply