Change date format in dialogflow

Question

I`m currently trying to build up a chatbot/agent with dialogflow and have honestly no knowledge about anything in the programming business/IT stuff. I´m a student who had a guestlecture where we were shown how to create Chatbots haha. But I was interested and sat down and tried to create one for my work. A simple bot that tells the customer about the opening times and gives out some information to save us some phone calls. So far so good. I want to include the function to book a table and my problem is the following: I´ve read many questions about changing the date and time format to receive a format like "4pm on Thursday" instead of "2020-12-26T16:00:00+01:00". So as I said I have no clue so far how the change the code to get a different output so my question would be if you could tell me where exactly I have to do that or where I can find a solution for that. Don´t get me wrong I´d love to know how to do it so yeah I´d be so happy if you could save that christmas present :) Best regards Mo

Answer 1

So, your question is vague and lacks details.
If you want to convert "2020-12-26T16:00:00+01:00" to "4pm on Thursday" in your local time here are helper functions to achieve that:

function convertParametersDateTime(date, time){
  return new Date(Date.parse(date.split('T')[0] + 'T' + time.split('T')[1].split('+')[0]));
}


// A helper function that adds the integer value of 'hoursToAdd' to the Date instance 'dateObj' and return a new Data instance.
function addHours(dateObj, hoursToAdd){
    return new Date(new Date(dateObj).setHours(dateObj.getHours() + hoursToAdd));
}

// A helper funciton that converts the Date instance 'dateObj' into a string that represents this time in English.
function getLocaleTimeString(dateObj){
    return dateObj.toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {hour: 'numeric', hour12: true});
}

// A helper dunction that converts the Date instance 'dateObj' into a string that represents this date in English
function getLocaleDateString(dateObj){
    return dateObj.toLocaleDateString('en-US', {weekday: 'long', month: 'long', day: 'numeric'});
}

Those are the helper functions. You have to call them inside the Fulfillment function for your intent. Here's a very simple example:

function makeAppointment (agent) {
    // Use the Dialogflow's date and time parameters to create Javascript Date instances, 'dateTimeStart' and 'dateTimeEnd',
    // which are used to specify the appointment's time.
    const dateTimeStart = convertParametersDateTime(agent.parameters.date, agent.parameters.time);
    const dateTimeEnd = addHours(dateTimeStart, appointmentDuration);
    const appointmentTimeString = getLocaleTimeString(dateTimeStart);
    const appointmentDateString = getLocaleDateString(dateTimeStart);

    agent.add(`Here's the summary of your reservation:\nDate&Time: ${appointmentDateString} at ${appointmentTimeString}`);

}

The codes might include some syntax errors. Those functions give what you are looking for but you would have to adjust them according to your needs.