Grouper Developers Forum

["Cantor, Scott E." <>]

On 7/15/11 12:01 PM, "Chris Hyzer" 
<>
 wrote:

>Well, we are designating a timezone, not a timestamp, right?

I'm saying avoid timezones at all costs. Callers can locally convert as
needed, for display, input, whatever.

But if you don't want to avoid them, don't try and set the timezone as
some kind of extra field. Use a date/time format that includes the time
zone designation to clearly indicate what the absolute time value is.

>Though I could also accept a timestamp in some format.  Grouper uses the
>format for WS currently:

I would avoid custom formats, and just use the ISO standard.

>We could make timezone be a part of that optionally...  can you do
>everything with GMT?  E.g. timezones like Indiana cant be translated to
>gmt right?

Timezones are just an offset from UTC. An ISO time in UTC (not really GMT)
has a "Z" in the time zone designator. Anything else is represented as a +
or - offset in hours after the local time value. The same value can always
be represented as a local time with offset, or a UTC time. Using the
latter is easier to use in terms of consistently storing and passing
around the values.

-- Scott