How to Calculate Total Working Hours from Two Time Fields in Frappe?

Frappe Framework Customization
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I’m working with two Time fields in my custom Frappe Doctype:

  • from_time (e.g., 09:00)
  • time (e.g., 17:30)

I want to calculate the total working hours between these two time fields (not just the time difference in terms of string/duration, but the actual hours as a float like 8.5).

I’ve seen frappe.utils, but I’m not sure which is the correct utility function to use specifically for Time fields (not Datetime).

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Since you’re dealing with Time fields (not DateTime), you won’t find a direct frappe utility just for that. Best practice is to use Python’s datetime and timedelta together with Frappe’s get_time helper.

Here’s a clean way to do it inside your Doctype Python code (e.g., validate or a custom method):

from frappe.utils import get_time

def calculate_hours(from_time, to_time):
    # convert to Python time objects
    start = get_time(from_time)
    end = get_time(to_time)

    # convert to datetime for subtraction
    from datetime import datetime, timedelta

    today = datetime.today().date()
    dt_start = datetime.combine(today, start)
    dt_end = datetime.combine(today, end)

    # handle case where end < start (e.g., crossing midnight)
    if dt_end < dt_start:
        dt_end += timedelta(days=1)

    diff = dt_end - dt_start
    hours = diff.total_seconds() / 3600  # float hours

    return hours

Usage inside your DocType:

self.total_hours = calculate_hours(self.from_time, self.time)

Example:

  • from_time = 09:00
  • time = 17:30
    → hours = 8.5

Key point: frappe.utils.get_time() converts a Time field to a Python time object safely, then you do the math with datetime.combine.

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