Datetime representation
Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud. Availability This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage. Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments. The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. Availability This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage. Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments. This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.
Serverless
Generally available
Stack
Generally available
Datetimes in Painless are most commonly represented as a numeric value, a string value, or a complex value.
- numeric
- A datetime representation as a number from a starting offset called an epoch; in Painless this is typically a long as milliseconds since an epoch of
1970-01-01 00:00:00Zulu Time. - string
- A datetime representation as a sequence of characters defined by a standard format or a custom format; in Painless this is typically a String of the standard format ISO 8601.
- complex
- A datetime representation as a complex type (object) that abstracts away internal details of how the datetime is stored and often provides utilities for modification and comparison; in Painless this is typically a ZonedDateTime.
Switching between different representations of datetimes is often necessary to achieve a script’s objectives. A typical pattern in a script is to switch a numeric or string datetime to a complex datetime, modify or compare the complex datetime, and then switch it back to a numeric or string datetime for storage or to return a result.