Provide "time" as timestamp (milli seconds since epoch)

[rmannibucau]

Describe the idea (required)

Some plugins need a long to represent a timestamp, with the time format it needs some custom conversion, since time values come from long it should be possible to just propagate them.

Tell us about the expected behaviour (required)

Could be using timeLong or alike as suffix.

Context (optional)

No response

PS: it looks quite straight forward but if it helps I'm happy to start to do some PR but was not sure of the solution so didn't start any yet

[TheSnoozer]

Just to clarify: Would the Unix epoch time like a 1697817375 be essentially what you are asking?

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Unix time[a] is a date and time representation widely used in computing. It measures time by the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, the Unix epoch, without adjustments made due to leap seconds. In modern computing, values are sometimes stored with higher granularity, such as microseconds or nanoseconds.

Do we need to be more precise than seconds? What about Timezones? I guess since epoch is counting from 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 we would then assume that number of seconds represents the difference to the local UTC time.

[rmannibucau]

@TheSnoozer I need milliseconds precision but I guess ${git.xxxx.time.ms}000 can do the trick so it would work. Value must be compatible with Instant;ofEpoch but the second version is sufficient if simpler for you (and maybe more generic).

[TheSnoozer]

Hello,
thanks for the quick feedback! Ok, should make little difference to report the number of milli seconds since epoch (https://currentmillis.com) which would be something like 1697817924644.

A

import java.time.Instant;

class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(Instant.ofEpochMilli(1697817924644L));
    }
}

would print

2023-10-20T16:05:24.644Z