Concatenating fields into a single date/time field

[George Tsemberlis]

Hi there,

For reasons that predate my involvement, there is a single select field that exists in our instance that consists of a bunch of times, eg "3:00 PM"

I'd like to  backfill via an A4J rule to combine these with an existing date field into a new single Date/Time Field but am having difficulty getting the values of both of these fields into something that Jira will accept as a valid entry for a date/time field.

Any advice? 

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @George Tsemberlis 

Without seeing the specifics of your rule for context...

There are several ways to do this using date / time functions:

1. Parse the date and time values as text, merge them, and then convert with the toDate() function and the specific format.  I would try this way first.
2. Parse the time value into parts, and use the with[Attribute] functions to set the hour, minute, etc. for the date
3. Parse the date, and use with[Attribute] to combine to the time (i.e., this is the opposite of #2 above)

Kind regards,
Bill

[George Tsemberlis]

How my rule is currently:
- Take {{issue.Time Field.value}} as a variable {{TimeToString}}, logs correctly as "11:30 PM"
- Take Date as  {{issue.Date Field.JiraDate}} as a variable {{DateToString}}, logs as 2025-08-25

When I try to put them together I have them going into the Date/Time Field as {{DateToString}}{{TimeToString}}

What's the context for the toDate() function given the above?

[Bill Sheboy]

Here is the documentation for that function: 

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/examples-of-using-smart-values-with-dates/#Converting-text-to-dates

You may try letting the rule "guess" the format with just toDate() or to specify it exactly, such as with:

{{varSomeVariable.toDate("yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm a")}}

Please see the date / time format function to learn more about possible formats to supply based on the Java documentation: 

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-date-and-time/#Date-format---

[George Tsemberlis]

Amazingly letting it "Guess" ended up working better than trying to strictly parse it out before sending everything into the field, thanks!