Date Time Stamp Formatting for import
Date time stamps are at the heart of any investigation. They are critical components to knowing when something occurred, and no investigation is complete without them!
Having the proper timestamp formats in your load file is critical to ensure the successful ingestion of your metadata.
CloudNine Analyst can recognize almost any Date Time format string value ranging from a full date string such as "Saturday, May 22nd, 2021 12:22:22 PM" to "2021-05-22 12:22:22 PM".
The 2 most common formats for supplying a date time are often the following:
- yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
- mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss
If the date separator is a forward slash ("/"), then the first digits of the date stamp will be assumed to be the month (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy). If the date separator is a dash ("-"), then the first digits will be interpreted as the year (e.g. yyyy-mm-dd). This is important when working with date stamps that provide a 2-digit value for the year.
For reference to the standard we comply with of ISO 8601, please see article here.
Time stamps are best supplied in a hh:mm:ss format. CloudNine Analyst does not work with milliseconds.
Time Stamp Exceptions
For Transactions, there may not be a timestamp associated with certain types of banking records, for example when a check was deposited. Although most banking institutions now have mechanisms for capturing a timestamp, manual transactions may just record the date. To accommodate this anomaly, Transaction metadata imports have a field entitled “Has_Timestamp”. By default, this is set to a “True” value (it can be supplied as 1/0, Yes/No or True/False). If this flag is set to "False", the timestamp on the metadata item will be ignored and a value of 12:00:00 PM will be used. This allows for proper adjustment for end-user time zones, keeping the Transaction relative to the end-user.
If you are using Microsoft's Excel to format your load file beware that Excel likes to drop the seconds off of the timestamp! Unless you modify your date time format directly in Excel this can be problematic. To prevent Excel from munging dates, you can use a "T" value between the date and time values (e.g. "yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss" - in Excel you must select "custom" format an input this as the pattern)