Value Name
DURATION
Purpose
This value type is used to identify properties that contain a duration of time.
Format Definition
This value type is defined by the following notation:
dur-value = (["+"] / "-") "P" (dur-date / dur-time / dur-week)
dur-date = dur-day [dur-time] dur-time = "T" (dur-hour / dur-minute / dur-second) dur-week = 1*DIGIT "W" dur-hour = 1*DIGIT "H" [dur-minute] dur-minute = 1*DIGIT "M" [dur-second] dur-second = 1*DIGIT "S" dur-day = 1*DIGIT "D"
Description
If the property permits, multiple "duration" values are specified by a COMMA-separated list of values. The format is based on the [ISO.8601.2004] complete representation basic format with designators for the duration of time. The format can represent nominal durations (weeks and days) and accurate durations (hours, minutes, and seconds). Note that unlike [ISO.8601.2004], this value type doesn't support the "Y" and "M" designators to specify durations in terms of years and months.
The duration of a week or a day depends on its position in the calendar. In the case of discontinuities in the time scale, such as the change from standard time to daylight time and back, the computation of the exact duration requires the subtraction or addition of the change of duration of the discontinuity. Leap seconds MUST NOT be considered when computing an exact duration. When computing an exact duration, the greatest order time components MUST be added first, that is, the number of days MUST be added first, followed by the number of hours, number of minutes, and number of seconds.
Negative durations are typically used to schedule an alarm to trigger before an associated time (see Section 3.8.6.3).
No additional content value encoding (i.e., BACKSLASH character encoding, see Section 3.3.11) are defined for this value type.
Example
A duration of 15 days, 5 hours, and 20 seconds would be
P15DT5H0M20S
A duration of 7 weeks would be:
P7W