I've created an email form using Infopath. (2007) It contains, first name, last name, date, time from and a time to field. I have supervisors enter the information on the form and submit it to our resource management department. The supervisors are in Central time, and the resource management department is in Eastern time. If the supervisor enters 9:00 AM, when the resource department opens the form it says 10:00 AM. Do you know of any way I can correct this? I've played with the time formats to use the ones without the * that says they are tied to the systems time clock but it doesnt seem to help. Thank you for any input you have! :)
http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/153/p/63976/244291.aspx#244291
seems like a bug , sharepoint server changes the time zone
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When getting information from Twitter's API for a user, they provide two fields related to the user's time zone:
utc_offset: -14400,
time_zone: "Indiana (East)"
Unfortunately, this doesn't tell the full story because I don't know if that UTC offset was calculated during standard time or daylight savings time. After dividing by 3600 seconds, I get -4 hours, which is valid during the summer months, but in the winter the correct value would be -5 hours.
If the value was ALWAYS determined by the daylight savings time value then I could write an algorithm for that, however after some searching on the subject I've seen several pasted outputs that contradict that assumption. (as a quick example, this question shows his/her offset as -21600 and then he/she says he/she is on central time, which if calculated during daylight savings time would be -18000).
It would make sense to me that the value would be calculated as of Jan 1 and the several pasted outputs I've found online fall into that category, but my own Twitter account shows the values listed above for which this assumption is invalid. My next thought was maybe it was calculated at the time I created my account, but then that seems erroneous as well because I can change my time zone at any later point (and even so, I created my account in November when I would have been on standard and not daylight time!).
My last thought was that maybe the value is being calculated by the date of the API request. This makes a lot of sense and the Twitter accounts I own all seem to validate this. BUT, the SA question I linked to earlier shows that the person answered the question on June 2nd, which is daylight savings time and his/her value of -21600 reflects a standard time for the Central time zone.
Anyone out there solve this problem? Thanks so much!
Twitter's front end uses Ruby on Rails. If you go to your own twitter account settings and look at the possible options for time zones (view source on the dropdown list), you will find that they match up with those provided by ActiveSupport::TimeZone, shown in this documentation. Although there appears to be some zones understood by Rails that Twitter has omitted, all of the Twitter zone key names are in that list.
I have asked Twitter to use standard time zone names in the future, in this developer request.
Why does Rails limit this list and use their own key values? Who knows. I have asked before, and gotten very little response. Read here.
But you can certainly use their mapping dictionary to turn the time_zone value into a standard IANA time zone identifier. For example:
"Indiana (East)" => "America/Indiana/Indianapolis"
"Central Time (US & Canada)" => "America/Chicago"
This can be found in the Rails documentation, and in the source code. (Scroll down to MAPPING.)
Then you can use any standard IANA/Olson/TZDB implementation you wish. They exist for just about every language and platform. For further details, see the timezone tag wiki. If you need help with a specific implementation, you'll need to expand your question to tell us what language you are using and what you have tried so far. (Or consider asking a new question about just that part of it.)
In regards to the utc_offset field, twitter does not make it clear what basis they use to calculate it. My guess is that it is the user's current offset, based on the time that you call the API.
Update 1
I have added support for converting Rails time zone names to both IANA and Windows standard time zone identifiers in my TimeZoneConverter library for .NET. If you are using .NET, you can use this library to simplify your conversions and stay on top of updates more easily.
Update 2
Twitter's API now returns the time zone in this format:
"time_zone": {
"name": "Pacific Time (US & Canada)",
"tzinfo_name": "America/Los_Angeles",
"utc_offset": -28800
},
Use the tzinfo_name field. Done. :)
We have an app hosted on a server in the UK that is accessed by customers all over the world. Our customers open an order for their company which is added to over time. One of the things they need to do whilst setting up their order is to select an order closing date at which point the order is closed automatically and submitted.
We want to close any order at midnight (local time based on timezone) on the date that is selected by the customer but this poses a problem when we take different timezones into consideration as our server is in the UK. Our server needs to know at which UK time to close the order so that the customer sees their order close at midnight their time.
We are asking customers to enter their timezone as part of the setup of their account so we are storing that in the database as a .net timezoneinfo id. We will also store the targetCloseDate which is say 30 Sep 2012 (in order to display the to user). However we need to convert the target date to a UK time that our server uses as the order close date.
How do we do this conversion?
Cheers
Wing
Have answered this myself after looking more into the timezoneinfo class. You can use:
TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(orderCloseDate, customerTimeZone, TimeZoneInfo.Local.Id)
This converts a datetime value - orderCloseDate using a source timezone and a destination timezone... perfect!!!
Wing
We have a website that has a large number of events that have dates and times created by admins. Admins choose a time zone for each date time entered, and they are stored in UTC time. We are trying to support a global audience, and be completely localized in terms of dates.
We have a search page, that allows dates to be entered as search criteria.
So users could say, show me all events between "12:01 AM July-1-2011" and "11:59 PM July 10-2011".
I'm trying to figure out what the best approach is to determining what time zone to consider the date filter criteria in.
Force end users to select a time zone when creating a date filters. This is cumbersome, and our designers our pushing back. It is what I would prefer.
Assume the the entered dates are in the users "preferred" time zone, which is set upon logging in.
Store times in Local time, without converting to UTC. This way the end users are searching in the admin created date. I hate this idea, i need help explaining why this is bad.
Please help!
Second option is possible solution to your problem. And it is probably the best.
Possibly you could get current time zone offset from web browser (with JavaScript) but the problem is, there are certain time zones that currently have the same offset but Daylight Saving Time switches on different dates, therefore search result would be inaccurate. By having User to choose his/her prefer time zone and storing that information in the profile, you could always present correct dates and times, as well as use this information for searching. However, I would add an information near search box, so that end User would know what time zone this refers to (with JavaScript that would be obvious: the current one, with profile User might forgot).
BTW. Time zone information is best to show as "UTC+02:00 (Warsaw, Zagreb, Skopje)" instead "Central European Time"...
As for other options:
1. Too much clicking. As well as "don't make me think, I want to have it in my local time zone, isn't that obvious?".
3. Local times will not be comparable against each other. You will soon end up with two different dates referring to the same point in time (at least in terms of the numbers). Really bad idea.
If server is located in US and website user is from Asia, when user add a new comment, he sees that the comment is added 10 hours ago because there is 10 hours timing difference in Asia and US.
What I want to do is when displaying comment, automatically convert date time to the time of target country or region where user come from.
Track user region/country
DateTime in any webpage should be converted to that country time
So that I can display user that he posted comment a few second ago...
Handle all dates internally as UTC,
meaning 0 hour offset
Use the language/country part of the user-agent string or the ip address to detect where the user is from, and look up the timezone.
Use TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(..) to convert the UAC time to the users local time
Point 2 will be the most work unless you find some lookup table or existing code to do this.
I am trying to determine, how I should implement local time in a web-app. All users are logged in, there are no anonymous users. They will need to see all time-values in their local time.
Is this how it should be done?
All DateTime values are saved as UTC-time in database
Each user has a UTC-Offset value stored in his profile
When displaying a datetime-value, I take the value from the database, and apply the users offset.
Is this the way to go? Or am I missing something?
Don't store a UTC offset for the user - that's not enough to know the full time zone information. You should store their Olson time zone ID, e.g. "Europe/London". Then you can display any UTC time in the local time, taking into account historical changes, daylight savings etc.
EDIT: It looks like the TimeZoneInfo ID isn't actually in the normal Olson format - but so long as there's something sensible you can display to the user (as a choice), and an ID you can retrieve the zone from later on, that's probably okay... you may have difficulties if you need to interoperate with other systems later though.
You should ask the user for their time zone (possibly trying to guess it first through JavaScript) - they will have more information than you do.
You should investigate the TimeZoneInfo class for more on this - I can't say I've used it much myself, but it's the way to go as of .NET 3.5. In particular, FindSystemTimeZoneById and GetSystemTimeZones will be important.
Time zones are a pain in general, but at least TimeZoneInfo gives a lot more support than the old TimeZone type.
That sounds like the most straightforward way to me. The only slip ups I could see occurring are some areas (such as parts of Indiana and I think all of Arizona) don't cooperate with daylight savings time, so you'll have to take extra precautions displaying the correct time for them.