Date and Time Format in a SMS Text Message

[MrSpecialK]

I have looked and searched the board and could find no help on formatting the time and date as reported in the SMS text messages. Does it exist?

I would like the time reported in 12 hour format instead of the 24 hour format used.

And by the way, anyone know why the date and time in SMS text message are reported like this:

12-08-15 23:51:16

Not a very friendly format for a quick glance read.
I really like the additional features this product has brought to my DSC alarm panel.
Great stuff.
Thanks

[floresta]

And by the way, anyone know why the date and time in SMS text message are reported like this:

12-08-15 23:51:16

Not a very friendly format for a quick glance read.

But quite friendly when you want to arrange things in the order in which they happened.

Year --> Month --> Date --> Hour --> Minute --> Second

Don

[GrandWizard]

No, there's no way to change the reporting format right now. I know we've had a proposal on the table for at least a year that would allow users to customise a message but I know the developers are swamped right now.

As for the format, how else would your present it? Aside from 12hour format.

I'm looking at my clock on my computer desktop and it reads 2012-08-16 12:20PM, that's pretty much the same thing isn't it?

[MrSpecialK]

Well,

The format in my post was this:

12-08-15 23:51:16

The date and the hour are blue and underlined in a sms message.
Personally I would have displayed it with the date colored and underlined and not included the hour. That would make it easier to recognize the data at a glance.

Just kind of funky...but I suspect the reason it is this way has something to do with the colon that is present in the data stream. Just a guess.

[GrandWizard]

That has nothing to do with us. That's your phone doing that because it thinks its a phone number.

[MrSpecialK]

Thanks for the info. That makes sense.

[GrandWizard]

My wife's phone does the same thing actually. I never really noticed it before.

[davep7]

I'm very much in favor of some SMS customization.

Somehow Partition:1 is still showing on every SMS even though I have selected "W/O Partition" on the contact config.

The messages are coming through with the activity duplicated (likely because the first line of the SMS "email" and the subject are the same)

I think "Security Event:" prefixing the data is a little redundant for an SMS as well.

Even though the date/hour getting underlined in blue is a function of the phone; clearly SMS messages are going out to phones, many of which do that auto-number-detection. Formatting the date/time differently would eliminate that problem.

Adding up all of these issues leads to an unwieldy SMS experience. If I could customize the SMS message, it would go from this:

Security Event: Closing By User
Dave / Security Event: Closing
By User Dave
Location: Home
Time: 2012-09-18 14:24:49
Partition 1

To this:
Closed by Dave at 2:24 PM

Much better eh?

[davep7]

I hate to derail a thread aimed at the content of messages; but it's also a little annoying to get two messages when the system is armed.

Message 1: Away Arm...
Message 2: Closing By User...

Sometimes the closing message comes first, sometimes the arm message comes first, but they both happen within seconds of each other. Is there any way to know the system was armed by a particular user rather than an anonymous arming and send a single message? i.e. Away Arm by User...

On a side note, Closing/Opening seem strange to me. Maybe these are industry terms used by installers? I would sure prefer Armed/Disarmed. How many people say "I just closed my alarm"?

Sorry for the load of gripes; I've been using the system for a few days so far and overall I'm really happy with the functionality and ease of integration.

[GrandWizard]

Hi, all events that are sent via Envisalerts come directly from your DSC panel. We don't interpet them. Why does DSC send two events? Not too sure but it may be a throw-back to when there was only one type of closing instead of the many types now (away, stay, night etc). As for the order of events, that is out of our control too.

Openings/Closings are indeed the industry terms. Along with Faults/Restorals for zone actions. Think of it more as "I closed my system" and "I opened my system" as these are the more common terms.

I think it may cause more confusion to go against 30 years of convention.