Improved date / time controls and ‘relative dates’ into the future

Making dates appear exactly as you want them to makes graphs more readable and useful. And capturing relative time periods into the future lets you include forecasts, future prices, and forward-looking data automatically.

Overview

Zing now offers two new capabilities let you handle date and time fields even more easily:

• Choose from multiple time/date formatting options - including defining your own custom time/date formats. This lets you specify how you want timestamps and date fields to display on graphs, tables, and data exports.
• Relative dates into the future. You could already query data prior to the date the query was run, but now you can specify relative date ranges into the future as well. For instance ‘actuals’ for the past year and a forecast for the next year relative to the date you run the query.

Time and date formatting

We’ve now added a much more full featured set of options to decide how your dates and times will show up when you create graphs and tables.

Create graphs that are easier to read, and make the most sense based on the geography that you and your users are in.

Once you set your time and date formatting on a particular graph that will be visible to all users of that graph.

Zing intelligently shows you time and date formatting options which align to the granularity of your data - for instance if you are aggregating orders at a monthly level, Zing will show you “Jan 2023”, “January 2023”, “2023-01”, “01-2023” and “2023 January”

If you choose the “custom” option, you can construct a custom format with the following symbols:

You can use characters like ‘/’, ‘:’, ‘-’, ‘.’ directly, without enclosing them in single quotes.

To use this feature, simply tap the x-axis on any graph which is a time series.

A set of options will appear below allowing you to either sort the graph on X or Y values ( ascending or descending), or specify time and date formatting.

Simply scroll through the set of options and select the one you would want. If you don’t see the time format you want, you also have the full power to configure those to your exact specification by using the freeform time date editor.

Relative dates into the future

For any date / time field, new functionality lets you filter by a time period:

• Relative date: After the time the query is run
• Relative date: Before the time the query is run up until after some period after the query is run

You could already filter by:

• Relative date: before the time the query is run

And also:

• Before a specific date
• After a specific date
• Between specific dates
• Equal to a specific date

These new date formatting and filtering options make it easier than ever to handle dates and time stamps to produce the perfect graph or table that is always updated to your question with easy-to-read labels.