Getting the current time in an Elm Action_
Aug 24, 2016

I often find myself needing to get the current time in an Elm action in order to write something to the model. However, since getting the time is a Task you would normally need two separate Msgs in order to implement this.

However, I came up with this little pattern that allows you to do it all in a single action:

type Msg
  = ActionThatNeedsTime (Maybe Time)

update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg)
update msg model =
  case msg of
    ActionThatNeedsTime (Nothing) ->
      model !
      [ Task.perform ActionThatNeedsTime ActionThatNeedsTime (Task.map Just Time.now)
      ]

    ActionThatNeedsTime (Just time) ->
      { model | currentTime = time } ! []

This uses Task.map to turn the result of Time.now into a Maybe, and since we know that Time.now can never fail we can just use the same action for the failure clause of Task.perform to save having to define a Noop.

Then, in order to use this simply call ActionThatNeedsTime Nothing and trust in the update function to retrieve the current time for you. As an added bonus if you happen to know the time already then you can pass that in directly.