How to read Firestore timestamp in Flutter

Question

How to change the firestore timestamp to something like "2 days ago or 1 hour ago" ? I tried displaying it directly but the data that came out was a string like Timestamp(seconds=1556459022, nanosecond=0).

How to do that?

Answer 1

Firestore's timestamp has a toDate() method that will return a dart DateTime object.

From that you can use regular dart solutions, like DateFormat or the timeago library to display it as in:

timeago.format(firestoreTimestamp.toDate());

Answer 2

This is how I worked it out. Import the following package:

import 'package:timeago/timeago.dart' as timeago;

Now, get the timestamp from Firestore. For example, for the field name 'timestamp', refer the following code:

final document = Firestore.instance.collection("yourCollectionName").snapshots();

Now Access your timestamp using the following:

`Timestamp timestamp = document['timestamp'];

Finally, display the result in the app. Example:

Text(timeago.format(DateTime.tryParse(timestamp.toDate().toString())).toString());