How can I return the 'current time' of a timer in my app?

General
1

I have a timer which is successfully sending messages every 60 seconds and my app is retrieving this data. All good!
However, when my app first starts I want to be able to get the current time of the server based countdown timer so I can display it within the app itself (ie time until leaderboards reset) . Is this possible or is there a better way?

Thanks
SImon

2

I figured I could do a client side calcultation based on the returned ‘publisheAt’ response value but the timestamp looks wierd. In my case the latest message response for this was: publishedAt":1504542097468

Not sure how I can calculate anything from that (ie currentTime - publishedAt= timerTimePassed)

Is this a valid plan?

Is that seconds since 1970 or something?

…oh wait…I see its a UNIX timestamp.

3

So it seems that the ‘publishedAt’ parameter in the returned response is actually the time when the message was received and not the time that the message was actually published at. I did a quick check on this by receiving the timestamp multiple times over a few seconds and it was slightly different each time.

Surely, if my timer is set to broadcast every 60 seconds (which it is) a true ‘publishedAt’ response would only change every 60 seconds?

4

Hi Simon,
I can advise you the following solution (you did not mention what language do you use for your custom business logic so I chose JS)

  • create a separate file with timer config (start date, interval)
'use strict';
module.exports = {
interval: 60,
startDate: 1504598760000
}
  • use it for initializing your timer
'use strict';
const config = require('../config/test-timer');
Backendless.ServerCode.addTimer({
 name: 'test',
 startDate: config.startDate,
 frequency: {
 schedule: 'custom',
 repeat: {'every': config.interval}
 },
 execute(req){
 //add your code here
 }
});
  • create a hosted service that will calculate next tick time of your timer
'use strict';
const timerConfig = require('../config/test-timer');
class TestTimerTick {
 /**
 * @route GET /
 * @returns <Object>
 */
 getNextTick() {
 const now = new Date().getTime()
 const start = timerConfig.startDate
 const interval = timerConfig.interval * 1000 //in ms
 const nextTick = start + interval * (1 + Math.floor((now - start)/interval))
 return {
 start: start,
 next: nextTick
 }
 }
}
Backendless.ServerCode.addService(TestTimerTick);

I hope it will be helpful for you and of course, it is not final code and you can change it to make it more proper for you.

Regards Ilya

5

Thanks, I’m actually trying to use ‘codeless’ but I cant find any way to get getTime() etc using that.

EDIT: Actually, I figured that using javascript is much easier and allows fro a lot more control. Once I switched, it was easy for me to send a header in my message with the current time that the message was sent and have my client side pick that up.

Thanks for the guidance.