CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3datetime
Soundar Rathinasamy
Soundar Rathinasamy

Reputation: 6728

How to give universal time support to my Rails application?

I am building a Rails application where users can post the interview details they know.The form has a input field interview time which is date time selector.I want to give universal support to this application.

Actual problem:

Let us say I have configured the IST time zone in my production server.Then if a user from Japan selects an interview time which will be parsed in IST time zone.The result will be an incorrect interview time.

To display the correct interview time.

1.Do I need to get the time zone from the user?(probably a select box)

2.Is there is any other option to automatically detect the time zone?

Thank you folks :)

If something is unclear please add a comment below the question.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 249

Answers (2)

Larry K
Larry K

Reputation: 49114

Baldrick's answer is right -- you should store the times in UTC and store each user's timezone in the user's record.

In addition, what users often want to see is what the local time was at the location.

To do that, when you store the UTC time, also store the timezone of the user who created the event.

The tricky part of all this is that MySQL and many other databases do NOT store the timezone with a date/time. So the timezone info is lost unless you store it explicitly in a different field.

Thus you need two fields in your database:

event_time_utc: Datetime, # UTC timezone for when the event happened
event_timezone: string # the timezone of where the event happened

Upvotes: 1

Baldrick
Baldrick

Reputation: 24340

I've got a similar issue. I kept the default rails config so all times are stored in UTC in the DB, and I used the following methods from ActiveSupport::TimeZone :

  • when I need to save a date from a form, I used local_to_utc to convert the date from local to UTC:

    ActiveSupport::TimeZone[my_timezone].local_to_utc(date)

  • when I need to display a date from the DB, I used

    ActiveSupport::TimeZone[my_timezone].utc_to_local(date)

This way all dates saved in the DB are in UTC, but are handled by the users in local time, that can be different for each user. You can store the timezone at User level (a string field in the DB), and/or use a select helper to generate a select field.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions