Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

Reading Date fields

Generally speaking, when a Date field is created, you have to specify the format so PDI can recognize in the values the different components of the date. There are several formats that may be defined for a date, all of the combinations of letters that represent date or time components.

These format conventions are not PDI-specific but Java standard.

The following table shows the main letters used for specifying date formats:

Letter	Meaning
y	Year
M	Month
d	Day
H	Hour (0 - 23)
m	Minutes
s	Seconds

As an example, the first field in our sales file, ORDERDATE, corresponds to a date. If we look at the first value, 2/20/2004, it's clear that we have the month, then the day, and then ...