Get seconds and milliseconds from date/time in formula field

Question

Is there a way break out the seconds and milliseconds from a date time field in a formula field?

WHY: I want our crew people to use check-in and check-out from their mobile device. However, if they forget to check in or don't have service, I need to give them the ability to manually override the time. I want the supervisor to be able to identify if the device did it vs end user. I can create a formula field that looks at milliseconds and if they are 0 then I would assume the date was modified manually.

Answer 1

The first part of the Griffin's answer is incorrect (should be RIGHT instead of LEFT).

This formula will give you the seconds as a number. As Griffin's answer states, you must use apex if you need milliseconds.

VALUE(
    LEFT(
        RIGHT(
            TEXT(now())
        ,3)
    ,2)
)

Answer 2

While NSjonas's answer does get you the correct result it does not follow Salesforce best practices and is thus incorrect.

Users should minimize the number of functions being used when possible. To do this the proper formula should be:

VALUE(
    MID(
        TEXT(NOW())
    ,18,2)
)

To solve the use case or for how to work with milliseconds please refer to my original answer.

Answer 3

No. The closest you can get is in seconds and even that involves some gymnastics. In order to check the seconds on a DateTime field you can do the following:

IF((RIGHT(TEXT(TODAY()),3) == '00Z'),true,false);

This would return true of the seconds are 0 and false if the seconds are anything but. I don't recommend this seeing as you really have a 1/60 change instead of the 1/6000 you would if milliseconds were included.

Now you could use Apex. There it's pretty simple.

Datetime yourDate = Datetime.time();
Integer seconds = yourDate.second();
Integer milliseconds = yourDate.millisecond();

Boolean manualUpdate = false;

if(seconds == 0 && milliseconds == 0){
        manualUpdate = true;
}

Further DateTime function can be found in documentation.