Drupal 8 caches. Relative date caches issue. Field should display "Yesterday" but still display "Today"

Question

Drupal 8.

Please help to find the best solution.

I have nodes that should display created date. If node created today text should be - "Today" If yesterday - "Yesterday". In other scenarios should display just creation date - 22/02/1999.

I've created custom field formatter to achieve this. And everything ok except one thing - caches.

Due drupal caches the node that created today, tomorrow should display "Yesterday". But tomorrow it will still display "Today" until I clear the cache manually. After cache clearing, it will say "Yesterday", like it should.

Please help me to resolve this issue. I will be glad to avoid using

'#cache' => [
  'max-age' => 0,
]

Answer 1

In my opinion, the best solution for your problem is to use '#cache' => ['max-age' => 0] for your custom field formatter because only that field will have to be re-rendered each time node hits. That doesn't affect the performance of node page much.

But if you must avoid using cache max-age, you can try the following approach:

1. Create a cronjob to be executed at 0am every day
2. That Cron will query for nodes created in the last 48 hours.
3. Invalidate the cache tag 'node: <nid>' for those nodes.