Work with date and time formats in Postman Flows

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

How date and time is stored in Flows

All 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 APIs. FQL has a now function that prints the current timestamp in date, time, and UTC offset format (for example, 2023-08-11T02:03:46.145+00:00). If an API requires a shortened version of the timestamp, you can use the fromMillis function.

For example, to get a date without the time in ISO format, use $fromMillis($toMillis($now()), "y-M-d"). This function converts the date and returns it in a shortened YYYY-DD-MM format. For a list of supported FQL date and time formats, see Time and date formatting.