[Improvement] Display run start time on Overview run cards

[MatheusAssisNeves]

First, thank you for creating and maintaining this amazing dashboard. It has been very useful for our teams and already meets almost all of our requirements.

It would be a great improvement to display the run start_time on each run card on the Overview page.

One of our needs is to quickly confirm whether regression tests for each of our projects are being executed and when the latest runs occurred. Showing this information directly on the run cards would make the Overview page even more useful, as users could understand the freshness of each project's results at a glance without navigating to another section.

For example, the information could be displayed as:

2025-03-13 00:30:06

It would also be helpful to include a relative-time suffix indicating how old the run is, such as:

15 minutes ago
3 hours 20 minutes ago
4 days 2 hours ago

I do not have a strong preference regarding the date/time format or where this information should be placed within the card. Any presentation that keeps the cards readable and consistent with the current design would work well.

Here is an HTML I generated using the example dashboard demonstrating one possible implementation as a visual reference:

Robot Framework Dashboard - 2026-05-25 22_37_25.html

Thank you again for the excellent project and for considering this improvement.

[HuntTheSun]

Hi @MatheusAssisNeves

a feature like this would also be helpful for my use case, but I would prefer a configurable (per cli and/or settings dialogue/json) way,
so that users can choose what to include.
Additional information would be tough to fit into the cards as they are now, I am planning on proposing a feature for minimal run cards without the run stats graph, this would save visual space and a lot of processing time, I havent opened an issue for that yet though.
Would this be a direction that would also fit your use case, or would you prefer to try to somehow make it fit in the existing cards?

[MatheusAssisNeves]

Hi @HuntTheSun ,

Yes, configurable card content via settings makes a lot of sense, since each team may want to show different information.

For the space issue, I would probably reduce the redundancy between the text status counts and the doughnut chart. Removing the text and keeping a smaller horizontal status bar with counts could be enough.

No strong preference on layout from my side. The main need is to show the execution date in the Overview cards, ideally with a relative time like “15 minutes ago” or “3 hours ago”.

[HuntTheSun]

Makes sense, lets see what @timdegroot1996 prefers layout wise and discuss then.
For the "x time ago", this should likely respect timezones, so a UTC delta of UTC run_start and UTC from client timezone, or do you see a reason not to do that or any reason to include an option not to do that?

[MatheusAssisNeves]

Yes, that makes sense.

I think the absolute displayed timestamp can follow the existing setting that converts timestamps to local time.

But for the relative suffix, like “1 hour ago”, I would expect that to be timezone-independent. It should be based on the elapsed time between the run start instant and the current instant.

So if a run happened 1 hour ago, it should show as 1 hour ago for everyone, regardless of their timezone. Only the absolute date/time display should change based on local timezone settings.