Please can you add a new FME Feature Function which calculates the current date and timestamp?
You have a Timestamp() function but that requires an input string and you have a Timestamper transformer but I think it makes sense to have a Now (or Today) function similar to applications like Excel.
This means you can then test a date/time attribute against the current date/time in a Tester transformer without needing an additional transformer or use of Python.
+32You can use a dateformatter on an attribute with value Today to return today's date.
I'd like to see this functionality rolled up into one transformer, I frequently use an attributecreator followed by a DateFormatter to produce a date/time to test against, but the fact that you can do this is not obvious.
The ability to easily calculate whether something was done prior to "6pm last Friday" is incredibly useful for me, and very simple using this method in FME
+17There are more aspects to date handling:
APIs often want UTCNow()
Dates should be timezone aware.
They make your fingers sticky
@DateTimeNow() function is now available in FME 2017.0. FME 2017.1 will also have new DateTimeStamper based on the @DateTimeNow().
Both - function and transformer - can output UTC time, local unzoned time, or local time with UTC offset.
+11@david_r
TIMESTAMP gives us fraction of seconds as well. @now rounding off seconds
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