To shield your application from low-level implementation details, iNTERFACEWARE Chameleon translates Date Time fields to a single internal time representation. The configuration is done using Date Time objects. These objects appear in the workspace and are referenced by composite grammar definitions.

	Understanding the relationship between date time format objects and Composite grammar definitions is very important. For HL7 there are typically two time composites called TS (timestamp) and DT (date) defined which then reference the appropriate date/time format object. If you must change a field from displaying as a timestamp to a date, you need to change the composite field type.

Using date/time formats in Chameleon allows your application to receive and send date/time information in dozens of different formats, but internally it only operates with the Date Time data type.