How Can I parse and convert Dates & Times? - datetime

Question

I met Odoo for first time a little less than a month ago, and, a DOS Systems Analyst from the 90's, am helping to implement it for a small but fast growing local manufacturer. Largely out of the industry the last 15 years, I'm not pro, but fast learning Python, HTML (some past exper) and Java...
I've been through the Developer Docs, as well as the Developer's Cookbook & Essentials, and a variety of online tutorials (just about everything Google could come up with from several search word combinations).
I read the closed post asking about this and get that there's apparently no actual Odoo reference...
Can someone please tell me where I might find 'date/time' parse and conversion functions that I can access from a report that is using the 'canned' 'hr.employee' model?
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<t t-name="hr_attendance.report_attendancelog">
<t t-call="report.html_container">
<t t-call="report.external_layout">
<div class="page">
<div class="oe_structure"/>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-xs-6">
<h2><br/>Attendance Log: </h2>
</div>
</div>
<table class="table table-condensed mt32">
<thead>
<th><strong>Date / Time</strong></th>
<th><strong> Operation</strong></th>
</thead>
<tbody>
<t t-foreach="docs" t-as="o">
<t t-set="DspDate" t-value="o.name"/>
<t t-set="DspTime" t-value="o.name"/>
<!-- I want to parse 'o.name', which is 'date time' format (from
Attendance record) to separate 'Date' and 'Time' fields... -->
<!-- t t-set="DspDate" t-value="FUNC?(o.name)"/ -->
<!-- t t-set="DspTime" t-value="FUNC?(o.name)"/ -->
<!-- and do calcs with date & time...) -->
<!-- t t-set="ClcDt1" t-value="FUNC?('PrvDt')"/ -->
<!-- t t-set="ClcDt2" t-value="FUNC?(DspDate)"/ -->
<!-- t t-set="ClcTm1" t-value="FUNC?('PrvTm')"/ -->
<!-- t t-set="ClcTm2" t-value="FUNC?(DspTime)"/ -->
<tr>
<t t-if="ClcDt1 == ClcDt2">
<td><span t-esc="DspDate"/></td>
<td><span t-esc="DspTime"/></td>
<td><span t-esc="o.action"/></td>
</t
</tr>
</t>
<tr class="border-black">
<td colspan="3"><strong>Total period</strong></td>
<td><strong t-esc="o.worked_hours"/></td -->
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
</t>
</t>
</t>
I prefixed 'br/' to H2 to keep the it properly positioned (only shows on the first page), but subsequent pages obscure the col headers behind the layout header... this is probably obvious and I'm oblivious, but how can I adjust the 'H2' position to be below the 'header' setup by 'report.external_layout'??

Answer 1

On QWeb rendering you can use the python libs time, datetime and relativedelta. They are included in the so called QWeb context which is used for the evaluation (python eval) of the code in reports. You can see this in Odoo code here.
That means you do something like this:
<t t-set="DspDate" t-value="datetime.datetime.strptime(o.name, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')" />
I prefer parser classes for reports to define some common functions. For example: you can define the function getDate doing your parsing or transforming stuff. The report code will be much better with parser functions:
<t t-set="DspDate" t-value="getDate(o.name)" />