Jira Cloud - How updating Date Time format affects the existing values?

[Shahroz Naeem]

Hi!

We have a number of custom fields tracking different timestamps of an incident's life. For example - Incident Started Timestamp is one of the fields. One of the uses is to calculate the incident duration, but since the default timestamp format of Jira is MMM dd, yyyy HH:mm, we cannot track incidents that occur only for a few seconds. 

I'm planning to adjust the format to MMM dd, yyyy HH:mm:ss to allow us to track seconds as well, but my question is - 

How would this affect all the values in existing tickets which don't have the seconds. Would it append :00 at the end of all values or would the values become invalid? (We have thousands of tickets already in Jira and I don't want to mess up any existing data.)

Thank you, in advance! 😄

(Apologies for the long rambling, but I thought it best to provide the background.)

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi @Shahroz Naeem ,

Try using Automation For Jira to calculate the difference in the fields. You would need another custom field to hold the value - also a date/timestamp type of field. Something like Incident Duration. Then to calculate the value when less than a day, use something like:

{{[date1].diff([date2]).[unit]}} where the unit is seconds or minutes

So, {{issue.incident started.diff(issue.incident ended).seconds}}

Or you can use the custom field id like this:

{{issue.customfield_10015.diff(issue.customfield_10016).minutes}}

[Shahroz Naeem]

Hi @John Funk
Thanks for the response! I already know that part. What I'm worried about is if changing the global date format would simply append the extra data to existing value or if something else might happen.

[John Funk]

Sorry - did not read your question all of the way through before. Yes, it would just append :00 to the end of existing issues. 

[Shahroz Naeem]

@John Funk Thank you! 😄