Time

The Time data variable type represents a time of day. It’s used whenever you want to store or display a specific clock time without a date.

Specification

• A Time variable should be represented as an ISO 8601 time string.
• The format is hh:mm:ss.ms where hh marks the hours, mm marks the minutes, ss marks the seconds and ms represents the milliseconds with a maximum of three decimal places.
• We recommend using ISO 8601 time strings for all new implementations as this provides a standardized, human-readable format that's widely supported across systems.

ISO 8601 Duration Components

The ISO 8601 time format supports various time components:

• [hh] refers to a zero-padded hour between 00 and 24.
• [mm] refers to a zero-padded minute between 00 and 59.
• [ss] refers to a zero-padded second between 00 and 60 (where 60 is only used to denote an added leap second).

Historical Fallback

For backwards compatibility, HELIO still supports time values provided as integer numbers representing milliseconds.

However, this approach is considered legacy and should not be used in new implementations. Units other than milliseconds are not currently supported in the integer format.

When using this approach, the integer millisecond values will be converted to seconds, minutes and hours when displayed. This means large durations may appear as an unexpectedly high number of hours (e.g., 34 hours instead of 1 day and 10 hours), rather than being converted to more readable units days and weeks.

Examples

Time String	Description	Equivalent (ms)
00:00:30.000	30 seconds	30000
02:15:45.000	2 hours, 15 minutes, 45 seconds	8145000
00:00:00.200	0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds, 200 milliseconds	200

Learn More

• ISO 8601 Times Standard
• Why is there an offset between the timestamps from my PLC and those displayed on the HMI?