The Dart Time Machine is a date and time library for Flutter (native + web), and Dart with support for timezones, calendars, cultures, formatting and parsing.

Time Machine provides an alternative date and time API over Dart Core.

Dart's native time API is too simplistic because it only knows UTC or local time with no clear definition of time zone and no safeguards ensuring that time stamps with and without UTC flag aren't mixed up. This can easily lead to bugs if applications need to work in local time, because native Dart timestamps look the same after conversion. Applications that benefit from Time Machine are applications that need to perform tasks such as

• scheduling reminders
• displaying an object's time information (file dates, email dates, calendar dates)
• sharing data between users that work in different time zones

But Time Machine is also useful for applications that work with universal timestamps only. Its Instant class provides nanosecond precision and fake clocks can be used during unit testing.

Time Machine API

• Time - an amount of time with nanosecond precision
• Instant - a unique point on the UTC timeline
• LocalTime - the time on the clock
• LocalDate - the date on the calendar
• LocalDateTime - a location on the clock and calendar
• Period - amount of time on the clock and calendar
• Offset - the timezone offset from the UTC timeline
• DateTimeZone - a mapping between the UTC timeline, and clock and calendar locations
• ZonedDateTime - a unique point on the UTC timeline and a location on the clock and calendar
• Culture - formatting and parsing rules specific to a locale

Time Machine's Goals

• Flexibility - multiple representations of time to fit different use cases
• Consistency - works the same across all platforms
• Testable - easy to test your date and time dependent code
• Clarity - clear, concise, and intuitive
• Easy - the library should do the hard things for you

The last two/three are generic library goals.

Time Machine is a port of Noda Time. The original version of this package was created by Dana Ferguson.

Example Code:

// Sets up timezone and culture information
await TimeMachine.initialize();
print('Hello, ${DateTimeZone.local} from the Dart Time Machine!\n');

var tzdb = await DateTimeZoneProviders.tzdb;
var paris = await tzdb["Europe/Paris"];

var now = Instant.now();

print('Basic');
print('UTC Time: $now');
print('Local Time: ${now.inLocalZone()}');
print('Paris Time: ${now.inZone(paris)}\n');

print('Formatted');
print('UTC Time: ${now.toString('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm')}');
print('Local Time: ${now.inLocalZone().toString('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm')}\n');

var french = await Cultures.getCulture('fr-FR');
print('Formatted and French ($french)');
print('UTC Time: ${now.toString('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm', french)}');
print('Local Time: ${now.inLocalZone().toString('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm', french)}\n');

print('Parse French Formatted ZonedDateTime');

// without the 'z' parsing will be forced to interpret the timezone as UTC
var localText = now
    .inLocalZone()
    .toString('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm z', french);

var localClone = ZonedDateTimePattern
    .createWithCulture('dddd yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm z', french)
    .parse(localText);

print(localClone.value);

Flutter specific notes

You'll need this entry in your pubspec.yaml.

flutter:
  assets:
    - packages/time_machine2/data/cultures/cultures.bin
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb.tzf
    # If you explicitly override the TZDB variant to use, include one or both of the following assets.
    # Otherwise tzdb.tzf above is enough.
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb_common.tzf
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb_common_10y.tzf

Your initialization function will look like this:

import 'package:flutter/services.dart';
import 'package:time_machine2/time_machine2.dart';

WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();

// TimeMachine discovers your TimeZone heuristically (it's actually pretty fast).
await TimeMachine.initialize({'rootBundle': rootBundle});

Or with: https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/flutter_native_timezone

import 'package:flutter/services.dart';

// you can get Timezone information directly from the native interface with flutter_native_timezone
await TimeMachine.initialize({
  'rootBundle': rootBundle,
  'timeZone': await Timezone.getLocalTimezone(),
});

Migrating from the original time_machine package

This project is forked from time_machine, the original repository seems to be abandoned. Since the original package couldn't be adopted, this package had to be given a new name and is available as time_machine2. The following changes are required to migrate from the original package to the new package:

Change dependency in pubspec.yaml:

< time_machine: ^0.9.17
> time_machine2: ^0.11.0

Change import statements:

< import 'package:time_machine/time_machine.dart';
> import 'package:time_machine2/time_machine2.dart';
- import 'package:time_machine2/time_machine_text_patterns.dart'; 

The text pattern library has been merged into the main library for better visibility and to avoid too much clutter in the import statements.

Change of asset declarations in pubspec.yaml (only required for Flutter):

flutter:
  assets:
    - packages/time_machine2/data/cultures/cultures.bin
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb.tzf
    # If you explicitly override the TZDB variant to use, include one or both of the following assets.
    # Otherwise tzdb.tzf above is enough.
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb_common.tzf
    - packages/time_machine2/data/tzdb/tzdb_common_10y.tzf

Time zone DB and culture DB asset handling

Time Machine includes the IANA Time Zone Database and date/time patterns from Unicode CLDR. These assets are XZ compressed and have comparably small size (43kb for the full TZDB and 47kb for date/time patterns).

In order to work on all platforms seamlessly without requiring too much package-specific configuration, the following strategy is used:

• Flutter Native: Assets must be listed in pubspec.yaml (see here) and will be bundled with the binary. TimeMachine.initialize() requires the application's rootBundle as parameter.
• Flutter Web: Assets must be listed in pubspec.yaml (see here) and will be retrieved through Flutter's service worker. This will cause additional HTTP requests during TimeMachine.initialize(). The data might be cached by the service worker so that subsequent reloads of the application may load the assets from the cache. TimeMachine.initialize() requires the application's rootBundle as parameter.
• Dart only: Assets will be compiled to code and embedded directly into the binary. This increases the size of the binary slightly but makes the entire package self-contained without additional configuration.

Time Machine currently ships three versions of the time zone database:

• tzdb (default, 43kb): from beginning of time until end of 2037
• tzdb_common (40kb): includes most common locations, from beginning of time until end of 2037
• tzdb_common_10y(12kb): includes most common locations, from 2019 to 2029

The database can be selected by passing the database name to initialize.

Use the default database:

TimeMachine.initialize({
  // only needed for Flutter
  'rootBundle': rootBundle,
});

Use the 10y database:

TimeMachine.initialize({
  'tzdb': 'tzdb_common_10y',
  // only needed for Flutter
  'rootBundle': rootBundle,
});

It is recommended to use the default database and only change it for the following reasons:

• Optimizing load times for Flutter Web: The 10y variant of tzdb is smaller and may speed up initialization.
• Reducing memory requirements: The 10y variant of tzdb has a smaller memory footprint after unpacking.

The benefit of tzdb_common is currently negligible and it may be removed from future versions.

Todos before v1

Todo (before v1):

• Port Noda Time
• Unit tests passing in DartVM
• Dartification of the API
  • First pass style updates
  • Second pass ergonomics updates
  • Synchronous TZDB timezone provider
  • Review all I/O and associated classes and their structure
  • Simplify the API and make the best use of named constructors
• Non-Gregorian/Julian calendar systems
• Text formatting and Parsing
• Remove XML tags from documentation and format them for pub (human second pass still needed)
• Implement Dart4Web features
• Unit tests passing in DartWeb
• Fix DartDoc Formatting
• Create simple website with examples (at minimal a good set of examples under the examples directory)

External data: Timezones (TZDB via Noda Time) and Culture (ICU via BCL) are produced by a C# tool that is not included in this repository. The goal is to port all this functionality to Dart, the initial tool was created for bootstrapping -- and guaranteeing that our data is exactly the same thing that Noda Time would see (to ease porting).

Future Todo:

• Produce our own TSDB files
• Produce our own Culture files
• Benchmarking & Optimizing Library for Dart

DDC Specific Notes

toString on many of the classes will not propagate patternText and culture parameters. Instant and ZonedDateTime currently have toStringDDC functions available to remedy this.

This also works:

dynamic foo = new Foo();
var foo = new Foo() as dynamic;
(foo as dynamic).toString(patternText, culture);

We learned in Issue:33876 that dynamic code uses a different flow path. Wrapping your code as dynamic will allow toString() to work normally. It will unfortunately ruin your intellisense.

See Issue:33876 for more information. The fix exists, now we just wait for it to hit a live build.

toStringDDC instead of toStringFormatted to attempt to get a negative contagion coefficient. If you are writing on DartStable today and you need some extra string support because of this bug, let me know.

Update: Dart 2.0 stable did not launch with the fix. Stable release windows are 6 weeks. Hopefully we get the fix in the next release (second half of September).