[SalesForce] TIMENOW() subtraction

I am trying to find out the difference between the current time and 5PM. I tried numerous variations and I just can't make sense of the results I am getting.

Lets say current time is 15:36 (3:34 PM)

When I run this formula

(TIMENOW() - TIMEVALUE("00:17:00.000"))

I get the following:

83949787

Given the fact that time time is 15:36 and I want to discover how long till 17:00 (5PM) I would expect one of these:

1h 24m

or

104 (minutes)

or

6,240 (seconds)

or

6,240,000 (milliseconds)

I can't make sense of this. Is this a fraction of a day, milliseconds….a decimal value?

Best Answer

TimeNow() returns the current time in GMT. When the user views a Time field it's converted to their local timezone, but the value in the field is also always stored as GMT. The almost-84 million number you're getting is the result of subtracting a later timevalue from an earlier one - rather than give a negative number, the system appears to calculate it as if the second number was actually that time the previous day. There are 84,400,000 milliseconds in a day, so your number would indicate the actual value from TimeNow() is just after midnight. You said you were trying at 3:34 PM Local time, so I'm guessing your offset is set to UTC -9:30 (French Polynesia) which would give a GMT time of 00:04, just before your subtracted value of 00:17.

Since you said you wanted to test since 5 PM local time, you'll need to account for your time offset, so your formula should be the following to get the time in milliseconds:

TIMENOW() - (TIMEVALUE('17:00:00.000') + (9.5 * 60 * 60 * 1000))
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