Friday 22 January 2010

Dates and Times, how do you handle them?

So my last post on dates and times got me thinking, how is everyone else dealing with them for international type applications. I am now curious how people store, report on, use dates and times.

So if you had a "Global" application, where the users are in any timezone what would you...

  1. Store in the documents
  2. Use for views
  3. Use for calculations
  4. Include in emails
  5. Deal with front end and server side use
Having exchange a few mails recently it seems that people do things differently. Some store in local, some convert to GMT/UTC, some store mulitple dates in different formats.

Please leave a comment!
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2 comments:

  1. Paul Withers22 January 2010 at 15:52

    We have a global web app, and set all dates using the timezone of the server.

    One thing to be aware of. If you're using dates on the web in a global, don't use the short date format (e.g. 28 Feb 2010). For some months in some languages, if you save an existing document, it doesn't recognise the month abbreviation and saves it as Jan. See this post one of my colleagues reported a while ago: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/a4859f3d0a8ebffa8525739f0061c15d?OpenDocument. As far as I'm aware it's still not fixed. We tried with a number of languages, and even German fails on one of the months.

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  2. Anonymous23 January 2010 at 01:56

    Careful with SLA calculations that are computed using scheduled agents and QuerySave events. The scheduled agent ran based on time/timezone on the server, and the QuerySave used the time/timezone of the pc the editor was in. Needless to say it caused some confusions with on time and overdue work.

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