Date and Time Localization in the Mobility Project

Owned by Dilanka Wijesekera (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 21, 2023 by Emelie Oskarsson

This page describes how the Date and Time localization is handled in BRP web and mobile applications.

Implementation of Date and Time Localization

Date and Time Localization of a website or a mobile app require taking into account different formats for date and time. These formats vary, depending on your target country.

Use of Libraries

In software development, there are a numerous technologies, languages, and frameworks that we can use to implement date and time localization. Considering the nature of the project’s requirements, Moment.js has been selected for the implementation.

Moment.js

Moment.JS is a JavaScript library which helps is parsing, validating, manipulating and displaying date/time in JavaScript easily.

As of the reasons for selecting Moment.js, following points are noticeable,

  • Browser support - Moment works well on Internet Explorer 8 and higher.

  • Dependency to other libraries - Several other libraries, especially date pickers and graphing libraries, take Moment as a dependency. If such a component is already used and cannot find an alternative, then Moment is already included in the project. Thus, it might make sense to continue using Moment throughout your project rather than including another date and time library.

  • Familiarity - Already understand its API and limitations well.

In the code level, we are parsing the ‘Locale’ to the moment.locale() function to detect the app specific locale and apply moment().format() function to configure the date and time formats.

Here, the ‘Locale’ object represents a specific geographical, political, or cultural region.

Moment's format() method is what you use to convert a Moment object to a string which is more readable.

For locale-aware formatting, you can use the L ,l, LTS, LL or other tokens to get a locale-specific formatting of the date and time.

Note that based on the design, different tokens have been used in different places to show the dates and times.

moment.locale(); // en moment().format('LT'); // 9:06 PM moment().format('LTS'); // 9:06:40 PM moment().format('L'); // 08/23/2022 moment().format('l'); // 8/23/2022 moment().format('LL'); // August 23, 2022 moment().format('ll'); // Aug 23, 2022 moment().format('LLL'); // August 23, 2022 9:06 PM moment().format('lll'); // Aug 23, 2022 9:06 PM moment().format('LLLL'); // Tuesday, August 23, 2022 9:06 PM moment().format('llll'); // Tue, Aug 23, 2022 9:06 PM

Example : For Sweden, moment.lang("se").format('L');

Limitations

Here, the implementation doesn’t support the date localization based on the ‘Regions’. Only the basic language will be selected.

Example : English (New Zealand), English (Canada), English (India)

In the web app, in the class info cards, it has been decided to show the time in 24-hour format irrespective of the format in the locale considering the spacing issues that might arise.