Get millis since epoch for Jira Automation

[David Jose Silva Ruiz]

Hello community,

I'm trying to automatically create annotations in Grafana, and for this, I need to pass an argument in millis (check the documentation here )

I tried this Jira smart value 

{{now.millis}}

But it's returning something that is not the number I'm looking for

now={{now}} > now=2021-03-11T21:00:26.5+0000
milis={{now.millis}} > milis=524000000

Those millis, converted to UTC time is (check here for more details)

Wed Jan 07 1970 01:33:20

 So, is there a way to do this? What does the value returned mean?

[nmenere · Accepted solution]

Hi Kian,

Milliseconds since Epoch was converted over from the old way of formatting dates. 

Good news is the old way is still there:

{{#now}}toMillis{{/}}

We are tracking adding it to the new way here: https://codebarrel.atlassian.net/browse/AUT-1915

Hope that helps,

Nick

[David Jose Silva Ruiz]

@nmenere : This is the best answer, and the most simple... but why isn't it anywhere in the documentation? 

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

@nmenere, 

Thanks for providing this answer! I was searching high and low for a way to do it outside of what I ended up doing. If Atlassian can get it added to the documentation that would be awesome!

[nmenere]

The reason for documentation is that this way of formatting dates is deprecated. The old way is documented at - https://confluence.atlassian.com/automation/archived-date-functions-993924673.html

[AldoCauchiSavona]

Thanks a million. Thought it could not be done,  but a friend at work showed me this answer and tested it and it worked :)

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

@David Jose Silva Ruiz, 

I don't know why that isn't working. I found the same behavior when I tried to use that format.

The only way I could eventually get this to work was by making a rest call to a publicly available API to give me the current epoch time and then passing that to another spot in my rule.

I  used the endpoint https://showcase.api.linx.twenty57.net/UnixTime/tounix?date=now. That seemed to give me the epoch in seconds, so then to get it to milliseconds I just appended "00" to the end.

[David Jose Silva Ruiz]

Thanks @Kian Stack Mumo Systems ! I was working on a similar solution to yours, but querying https://currentmillis.com/time/minutes-since-unix-epoch.php (which returns minutes instead of millis), then I was converting them with this

{{#=}}{{webhookResponse.body}} * 60000{{/}}

I believe both work almost the same, thanks!

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

I was having problems with the formatting when I performed a multiplication. It kept returning a value in scientific notation instead which wasn't helpful!

[Italo _Modus Create_]

@Kian Stack Mumo Systems @David Jose Silva Ruiz ,

I had a similar issue on converting Epoch Time to JIRA using Automation and I described the workaround here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/How-to-convert-unix-epoch-timestamp-to-DateTime/qaq-p/1491982#U1822804