Work with date and time formats in Postman Flows

Many APIs expect different formats for date and time. Flows has many built-in FQL functions to handle any of the formats required.

How date and time is stored in Flows

All three of the Flows date and time blocks (Now, Date, Date & Time) store date and time as a number. This number is a common format which is the number of milliseconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1st January 1970 (referred to as Unix time). This simplifies date comparison, and the number can be converted into other formats as needed.

Use FQL for different formats

The ISO 8601 format is commonly used in a lot of APIs. FQL has a now function that prints out the current timestamp in ISO format 2023-08-11T02:03:46.145+00:00. If an API requires a shortened version of the timestamp, the fromMillis function accepts a format called a picture which can be found here. For example, getting the date without the time in ISO format can be achieved using the FQL below: