Working with Date and Time in BAS

Automation runs on time: timestamps, intervals, “wait until tomorrow,” “only post every six hours.” The Date and Time module gives BAS a precise, consistent way to handle all of it.

How BAS stores time

BAS uses its own representation of date and time, built on UNIX time — the number of milliseconds since midnight UTC on 1 January 1970 (the “UNIX epoch”). UNIX time aligns with UTC and is the standard encoding operating systems use.

Storing time as a single number of milliseconds has real advantages: it’s trivial to compare two dates down to the millisecond, it converts cleanly to any human-readable format, and it’s compact — just 4 or 8 bytes. For large volumes it’s far more efficient to keep time as one value than as a bag of separate fields.

What the module can do

The module is rich in actions for every common need:

• Convert a date to a string and a string back to a date.
• Convert milliseconds to a date and back.
• Create a date explicitly, or get the current date now.
• Add seconds to a date and compute the difference between two dates.
• Change a date’s timezone and read its timezone.
• Extract parts: day of month, day of week, year, month, week, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds.

When to reach for it

Use it whenever your bot needs to stamp data with a time, measure how long since something happened, gate an action behind an interval, or align records to a timezone. If you’re scheduling a script to run at a specific time, this module covers the logic — or you can lean on the built-in scheduler. Either way, because everything sits on UNIX milliseconds underneath, your time math stays consistent no matter how you display it.