Datetime/Timestamp columns

Would be really useful to have a column type for datetimes/timestamps. Date is nice, but I sometimes need to record time information with the date. Right now I do this with a string, but as a result I don’t get enforcement of the type and it doesn’t work with visualizations like the Gantt chart (which, sure, would not be high enough resolution to use the time, but would still be nice in some cases where I need to record the time).

I realize I could sort of get what I want using a date column and then a string column for the time next to it, but that’s more to keep track of.

Alternative idea: allow the date type to accept a time, and in the config for the column you set the granularity, so date becomes datetime but you could make it a date column by setting “day” granularity. Could even let you do things then like have a “date” that only is to the month or quarter or year level, or a datetime that’s only to the hour or minute and not the second level.

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Thanks for the suggestion, Gordon! Out of curiosity, do you mind shedding a bit more light on your use case and specific workflow for this improvement?

Sure. In my case I have a list where we track outages/incidents. I have a column for start and end of the incident that tracks time from when customers started to observe the incident to when we mitigated the incident and service returned to normal. This needs to be more than just a date, since sometimes incidents are short lived, and I care about tracking how many minutes (and in the future, maybe how many seconds) the incident was open.

Gotcha! So as a heads up, we’ve been working on a native time-tracking feature that will let users start/end timers for individual tasks (and also aggregate times of subtasks.) Would this address your flow?

Probably, but only if we could manually set the start and end datetimes. If we had to use a timer someone starts and stops that wouldn’t really work for us, since we’re often going to add this information in later based on observations of metrics, and by definition we’re not in height at the start of an incident because there’s lag between when it starts and when we get alerted.

Ahh, I see. Appreciate the context :ok_hand:t5: Passing this along to the team.

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