How to get substring of a SearchKit result column?

Question

How to get substring of a SearchKit result column? I want to truncate the event start time from 17:15:00 to just 17:15.

What I have:

• My test setup is newest WP 6.3.2 and newest CiviCRM 5.66.0.
• CiviEvent: several events, with a starting date and time, e.g. 17:15.
• SearchKit: a search that gives me open events in the next 2 weeks.
  The result presents no actions, no sorting, just a static table listing.
• Form Builder: a form to hold the results from the search.
• WordPress: a page that contains the shortcode with my search.

What I want:

• The final output contains a column with event start time including seconds. It is silly to show an event start time with seconds - and I understand that this comes from the timestamp format in the database.
• I do not see any suitable field transformation that I could apply in the SearchKit.
• In the reports output part of SearchKit, each column has the Rewrite Text function using "SMARTY conditions" but it is not clear to me how that works. My latest attempt is [{TIME_start_date|substr:0:5}] but that generates no output. Can you give an example?
• I cannot think of another way to truncate the time value, or any way to do any kind of substring operation at all.

How can I get rid of the seconds in the time column?

(ignore the missing localisation of the weekday and month words)

Answer 1

Agree with Coleman that it would be great to have Format Date in SearchDisplays.

If you want to do this in the Smarty rewrite, you can do something like {"[start_date]"|date_format:"%H:%M"}, without the field transformation.