Comment 6 for bug 1182091

Ah, yes, I agree that "virtualizing" the TIME field directly is even better.

I am not convinced of the filter solution if it implies yet another ad-hoc addition to channel name parsing to support `caget xx.TIME`. I understand the temptation but I recommend against it. There is no easy way to make such ad-hoc syntax extensions in a modular way and the more we add the harder it gets to make the next change. This approach clearly doesn't scale in the long run. I find it cleaner to add a special processing phase for dbCommon fields. Once this is implemented it can easily be re-used for other extensions.

Also, converting timestamps to human readable (or any other) formats is clearly a task that clients are better prepared to do; IMO we should not bother the server with that.