ftTime

ftTime = 10

Example

function IsTimeOnly(Field: TField): Boolean;
begin
  Result := Field.DataType = ftTime;
end;

Usage

ftTime identifies time-only field metadata exposed through TTimeField without a date, timezone or guaranteed duration interpretation.

Additional Technical Info

ftTime is declaration ordinal 10 of TFieldType. Delphi maps it to TTimeField, a TDateTimeField descendant with a four-byte provider data size and a public TDateTime conversion surface.

The field contains no date or timezone. A clock time such as 09:00 is not an instant until a date and zone are supplied, and daylight-saving rules cannot be applied correctly without both. It is also not automatically a duration.

The installed string setter accepts a leading minus and stores the negative result of StrToTime; display adds the minus sign back. That RTL capability is unusual for a time-of-day field and provider support can differ. Do not use negative values as portable elapsed durations without an explicit schema contract.

Text parsing uses current host FormatSettings; display defaults to the long-time format. Empty text clears the field. Null and midnight both produce AsDateTime = 0, so test IsNull or use AsVariant when that distinction matters. Provider precision may round fractional seconds.

The example only inspects metadata and was source-reviewed; no clock, timezone, parsing, dataset, database, runtime or image test ran.

External references

• Embarcadero TFieldType, TTimeField and TDateTime.
• Free Pascal TFieldType and TTimeField compatibility references.

Created 2026-07-15