Dates & Times

How to work with dates and times in Melt's date-related builders.

The inner-workings of our date-related builders are heavily inspired by the research and work done by the React Aria team at Adobe, who have created robust date components that excel in terms of accessibility, user experience, and flexibility.

The builders we offer depend on the @internationalized/date package, which solves a lot of the problems that come with working with dates and times in JavaScript.

We highly recommend reading through the documentation for the package to get a solid feel for how it works, and you'll need to install it in your project to use the date-related builders.

    npm install -D @internationalized/date
	
    npm install -D @internationalized/date

Date Objects

We use the DateValue objects provided by @internationlized/date to represent dates in the various builders. These objects are immutable, and provide information about the type of date they represent:

  • CalendarDate: A date with no time component, such as 2023-10-11.
  • CalendarDateTime: A date with a time component, but without a timezone, such as2023-10-11T12:30:00.
  • ZonedDateTime: A date with a time component and a timezone, such as2023-10-11T21:00:00:00-04:00[America/New_York].

The benefit of using these objects is that we can be very specific about the type of date we want, and the behavior of the builder will adapt to that type.

Additionally, you don't have to worry about wrangling timezones, daylight savings time, or any other date-related nuance.

Parser Functions

This package also provides a number of parser functions that can be used to:

  • convert an ISO 8601 formatted string into a DateValue object
  • convert one type of DateValue object into another type
  • convert a DateValue object into an ISO 8601 formatted string
  • convert a DateValue object into a JavaScript Date object
  • and many more...

These functions are useful when you're getting dates from a database or API, and need to convert it prior to using it in a builder, or vice versa.