question Re: Nifi Now() Format in Archives of Support Questions (Read Only)

Nifi Now() Format

wsalazar — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:34:45 GMT

According to the docs ${now()} should yeild

"current date and time as the number of milliseconds since Midnight GMT on January 1, 1970."

Which sounds like a Unix epoch style timestamp in miliseconds

but what I actually receive is Fri Oct 30 02:36:08 UTC 2015

Does now() have options I am missing?

Re: Nifi Now() Format

andrewg — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 20:08:00 GMT

Wade, this is a documentation bug. The now() statement returns a Date object, not a long epoch, one more step required. E.g. consider this expression which gets 'yesterday':

${now():toNumber():minus(86400000):format('yyyy-MM-dd')}

You can follow https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-1078

Re: Nifi Now() Format

wsalazar — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 04:24:46 GMT

Thanks Andrew ${now();toNumber():Divide(1000)} got me what I needed.

Re: Nifi Now() Format

Griggsy — Thu, 07 May 2020 08:09:52 GMT

Hello all, I'm new here.

wondered if any of you could help me. I am trying to create a flow in Nifi to stop any incorrect timestamps getting out of Nifi (i.e. to HDFS or Splunk).

I want to capture any epoch timestamp 24hours in the future or 7 days in the past. I have created a processor that takes all timestamp formats back to epoch (as attribute named 'timestamp'. I then want to minus the timestamp from 'now' then use the 'gt' and 'lt' functions to return a true/false against another attribute I have made called ,valid_timestamp'.

first of all, can anyone help me minus my timestamp (value) from 'now'?

${now():toNumber():minus(timestamp(attibute value))

I spent the whole day yesterday trying to get this to work.. I'm sure there is a more straight forward way to achieve what I am after, any advice would be much appreciated.

Andy

Re: Nifi Now() Format

MattWho — Fri, 08 May 2020 19:11:30 GMT

@Griggsy

I'd strongly encourage you to start a new question rather then asking for help on an existing question with an already accepted solution. You'll get better traction and visibility that way.

Matt